환경불확실성 하에서의 성과제고: 경쟁전략과 탐색활동의 조절효과를 중심으로

Regional Agricultural Cooperatives consist of education & support, credibility, andeconomic divisions across commercial and non-commercial businesses. Regional AgriculturalCooperatives has basically been cooperation-oriented rather than competition-oriented. Recently,Nonghyup Bank of credibility division and Hanaro Mart of economic division are facing intensifiedcompetition against commercial banks and mega marts. The markets are also predicted to shrink dueto a population reduction and a demographic change. The environmental uncertainty becomes rapidlyincreasing and the performance improvement in the uncertain environment becomes an urgent issuefor its survival. The managerial actions reducing negative impacts from an external environment becomemore important. We intend to discuss how to manage the environmental impact by analyzing thecontingency factors reducing the negative impact of environmental uncertainty on organizationalperformance for Regional Agricultural Cooperatives and to find implications to support improvingperformance of the organizations exposed to an uncertain environment. The industrial organizationtheory argues that the properties of external environment affect the performance of the organizationsin a direct and critical way. But the resource-based view claims that their performance depends ontheir capability even if they are surrounded by the same environment, which indicates thatorganizational performance is a result of environmental management. This study suggests thatcompetitive strategy and scanning activity as organizational efforts for managing an environment.We test the efficacy of competitive strategy and scanning activity as environmental relievers basedon the data obtained from the survey for 122 divisions of 41 Regional Agricultural Cooperatives.According to the empirical results, environmental uncertainty doesn’t have an negative impact on divisional performance, which confirms that managerial actions reduces an environmental impact. Thenegative impact from an environment decreases as competitive strategy pursues low cost rather thandifferentiation. But It does neither decrease nor increase as scanning activity increases. These resultsconfirm that competitive strategy could act as meaningful buffers for an external impact, whereasscanning activity could not when it is used alone. It is also found that there is a synergistic effectbetween competitive strategy and scanning activity inducing higher performance improvement whenboth of the managerial actions are executed together. Our contribution is to prove that an organizationcould manage the external impact through managerial actions. It is another contribution to confirmthat the risk increase resulted from choosing a specific competitive strategy is more critical thanthe competence making competitive strategy effectively executed in environmental management. Thisstudy presents practical implications. Regional Agricultural Cooperatives could increase theirperformance when they face an uncertain environment by pursuing low-cost strategy rather thandifferentiation strategy. It is more recommended to use both of low-cost strategy and scanning activitytogether rather than to use low-cost strategy alone.