중소기업의 상대적 역량이 전략적 행위에 미치는 영향 연구

Recently, the business environment has been rapidly changing both inside and outside the country, and competition among companies is not limited to the domestic market but is expanding to the whole world. Under this fierce global competition, companies are forced to engage in competitive actions and reactions to survive in response to the demands of competitive environments. Accordingly, companies are required to analyze the market environment in order to respond appropriately to competitors’ actions to survive in response to the demands of competitive environments. Korean firms also need such a competitive response to competitive environment due to rapid economic development integrating into global economy, of which competence building is an important outcome. Therefore, the purpose of our study is to examine the rapidly changing competitive environment and to analyze strategic behavior of SMEs responding to actions of competitors. To that end, drawing on the Awareness-Motivation-Capability framework, we highlight the perceived competence gap between the focal firm and competitors, and examine the relationship between the behavioral driver of SMEs and their strategic moves to develop strategic moves in filling the competence gap with competitors under a competitive environment. Using 315 surveys from Korean SMEs, the collected data were analyzed by IBM SPSS Amos 26 Graphics statistics package. The collected data were performed using the IBM SPSS Amos 26 Graphics statistical package to analyze the mediation effect. The main results from the empirical analysis are as follows: First, our study predicted that motivation and awareness are the key drivers for initiating strategic actions by mediating the relationship between relative capability and strategic actions as the degree of perceived capability gap increases. Contrary to our expectation, our results show that given competence gaps with competitors, motivation and awareness partially mediate the relationship between relative capability and strategic action. The partially mediating relationship suggests that SMEs are not necessarily aware of or motivated to initiate strategic moves when they perceive the existence of a competence gap with competitors. As the perceived competence gap increases, the firms’ propensity to pursue strategic moves is partially mediated by the awareness of the competitive environment and the motivation to defend or improve their positions in the domestic market. Second, regarding the mediating effect of motivation and awareness, we predict that motivation will be more influential to initiate strategic moves since previous findings have shown that firms react more quickly and strongly if the actions of competitors are perceived as threatening to key markets. However, the study observed that the effect of awareness is more prominent than motivation in pursuing strategic actions as the perceived capability gap with competitions increases, which implies that the cognizance of decision makers on the competitive landscape is the key driver for initiating strategic actions for capability building, which are consistent with the upper echelon’s theory and strategic decision-making theory. Our paper endeavors to the literature in two ways. The first is to develop the behavior driver that can address the asymmetric competitive dynamics by modifying a capability factor. By extending the AMC framework, we empirically uncover asymmetric competitive dynamics. The second is to show that the relationship between capability and strategic actions is partially mediated by awareness and motivation as the perceived capability gap with competitors increases. In particular, we shed new light increases, a new on how the interplay of awareness and motivation affects the strategic actions of SMEs.