How foreign firms achieve competitive advantage in the Chinese emerging economy: Managerial ties and market orientation

By Julie Juan Li, Kevin Zheng Zhou. 2010

275 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As China experience unprecedented changes in its social, legal, and economic institutions, on what should foreign firms focus more to overcome this challenge, managerial ties or market orientation? This study investigates how managerial ties and market orientation affect competitive advantage and, consequently, firm performance in China. On the basis of a survey of 179 foreign firms in China, we find that both managerial ties and market orientation can lead to firm success--but in different ways. Market orientation enhances firm performance by providing differentiation and cost advantages, whereas managerial ties improve performance through an institutional advantage (i.e., superiority in securing scarce resources and institutional support). Institutional advantage, in turn, leads to differentiation and cost advantages and consequently superior performance.

Subfields: Accounting, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8261187dac52ebbde0a617a9a2a5c91c4edace8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

1. Zhiqiang Wang
2. Keah Choon Tan
3. Fei Ye

In Strategy and Management

1. Zhiqiang Wang
2. Keah Choon Tan
3. Fei Ye

Citations in the corpus

• Service innovation and customer satisfaction: the role of customer value creation (2017, background): “This study is opportune, as there is increasing call by scholars for an extensive study that focuses on innovation in services, which has arguable received scanty research focus and its impact on CS within the African context (e.g. Li and Zhou, 2010).”
• Effects of managerial ties and trust on supply chain information sharing and supplier opportunism (2014, background): “Some studies suggest that they can also provide firms with access to information and knowledge (Acquaah 2007; Li and Zhou 2010), though these findings are more strategic and general in the role of information sharing.”