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A Review on Strategic Management Theories and their Implications for Sustaining Competitive Advantage and Superior Performance in Organization

This article provides a synthesis of strategic management theories and offers an explanation of how these theories affects organization sustainable competitive advantage and superior performance. In addition to explaining why it is important to sustain organization competitive advantage and superior performance, the author described the relevant strategic management theories and explained the implications of sustaining organization competitive advantage and superior performance on developing and implementing effective organization practices. The final section of the paper provides an illustration with explanation on how effective organization practices can be explained through strategic management theories and how these efforts serve as a strategy to sustain organization competitive advantage and superior performance. Apart from that, this paper also provide an analysis on the critical factors among the respective strategic management theories and its effect on sustaining competitive advantage and superior performance and suggesting effective organization practices. The current global pandemic has derailed company strategy and focus and cause a range of unpredictable challenges. The current state of fear and uncertainty also makes it more difficult for managers to keep employees focused and motivated. In this uncertain condition, strategic management theory and research has offer little guidance to managers and no theories explaining the causes and processes of these uncertain changes enveloping entire industries during these difficult conditions. As most strategic planning relies on a high degree of certainty and predictability, however, the current global pandemic does not allow for either of these. It is important to understand that Strategic Management theories are meaningless if organization do not infuse them into the organization practices both internally and externally.

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A review of strategic management research on India

• Published: 28 April 2022
• Volume 40 , pages 1341–1392, ( 2023 )

Cite this article

• Anil Nair   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6033-8095 1 ,
• Mehdi Sharifi Khobdeh 2 ,
• Aydin Oksoy 3 ,
• Orhun Guldiken 4 &
• Chris H. Willis 1  

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In 1991 India embarked on far-reaching economic, financial and regulatory reforms, which led to not only a surge in economic growth, but also spurred scholarly interest in Indian firms, their strategies, and their business environment. As it has been almost three decades since the reforms were initiated, we believe that it is an appropriate time to take stock of the research on strategic management in the Indian setting. Our scoping review finds three dominant themes in extant research: impact of environment (specifically liberalization) on firms, strategies of firms, and the different ownership structures of firms. We discuss the key findings within these domains and identify the theories and methods that scholars have used to address their research questions. We assert that the unique Indian context — a mix of public and private economy operating within a democratic system — provides a rich environment for not only testing existing theories in strategic management but also generating new theories. We conclude by identifying several important areas of research and urging strategy scholars to engage with the opportunities offered by the evolving Indian business environment.

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Global value chains: A review of the multi-disciplinary literature

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) Scores and Financial Performance of Multilatinas: Moderating Effects of Geographic International Diversification and Financial Slack

Do ESG Controversies Matter for Firm Value? Evidence from International Data

Scoping reviews summarize the extant literature on a particular topic in order to investigate the extent and nature of research activities or to identify research gaps in the literature (Paré et al., 2015 ). These types of review studies focus more on the breadth of coverage of the literature than the depth of coverage.

Appendix 1  offers a brief narrative of India’s economic history and business environment to provide the context in which Indian firms and their strategies have evolved.

Use of the * character in ABI search produces all variants of relevant words such as strategy, strategies, strategic. We also searched the Web of Science and EBSCO databases to ensure that we did not miss any relevant peer-reviewed papers on Indian strategic management.

Our final search was performed on 10/31/2021.

The selection process for the table is based on citation rates (Podsakoff et al., 2008 ). We avoid the citation bias identified by Steel et al. ( 2021 ) by following Aguinis et al. ( 2011 ) coding citations per year. This allowed us to identify the impactful strategic management articles conducted in the context of India. We calculated the average cites per year per article following Judge et al. ( 2022 ) and included the articles that have above average cites per year from the total identified sample. Because of the time delay between release for new articles and resulting citations, we also include several of the more recent publications.

This was the latest edition of the yearbook that reported the total number of cooperatives.

Carr, Tagore & Company, the first managing agency company, was set-up in 1834 by Dwarkanath Tagore in Calcutta (Goswami, 2016 ).

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Appendix 1: Brief background: Economy, government and business

The evolution of India’s industry structure and firm strategies can be better understood by reviewing its history in terms of pre- and post-British colonization, which we briefly summarize below.

Early history

Prior to the arrival of British East India Company in 1608, India had its own organic system of trade and commerce. Merchants from the subcontinent were actively involved in trading silk, jewelry and spices across the world along the silk route for millennia (Behera, 2002 ). The Indian Ocean contained the most extensive trade routes of the day (McCloskey, 2010 ). An extensive review of early Indian business history is beyond the scope of this paper; we thus refer the reader to Hawk’s ( 2015 ) extensive analysis of law and commerce in pre-industrial societies, in which the author describes the various sophisticated markets (such as “haats” and “mandis”), trading structures, and trade routes that emerged in medieval India under various kingdoms.

Arrival of the British

With the arrival of the British East India company, some of these traditional practices changed. The British East India Company was initially established to trade with India, but gradually expanded its scope of operations to eventually control and govern a substantive part of the country. After a series of laws passed by Parliament to reform the East India Company, its monopoly rights were eliminated in 1813, which allowed for the entry of private merchants, traders and agencies into the economy (Goswami, 2016; Webster, 1990 ). Footnote 8 In 1858, the governance of the Indian subcontinent was fully taken over by the British Crown. The operations of the British East India Company and later the direct rule by the Crown led to the introduction of Western technology, education, legal system, institutions, business practices, and the founding of several industries. The development of ports and railroads and the establishment of the Bombay Stock exchange in 1875 further led to the growth of Indian enterprises (DeLong, 2003 ; Tomizawa et al., 2020 ).

India after independence

After independence, Indian leaders Gandhi, Nehru, and Patel had distinct visions for the economic development of the new country. Gandhi preferred an economic development model that was village-based, supported by small-scale enterprises relying on the widely available pool of labor (Rivett, 1959 ). In contrast, Nehru emphasized the need to embrace advanced technology and establish large-scale factories, with the public sector and central planning playing a dominant role in the economy. Patel, on the other hand, preferred the private sector to play a leading role in the economy (Kudaisya, 2014 ). Nehru’s vision prevailed (Ramesh, 1991 ), and in 1950 India adopted a path of centrally planned economic development (Das, 2016 ), along the lines of the former Soviet Union, through a series of five-year plans (Jalan, 1996 ). Due to the competing visions offered by cooperatives, small scale and private sectors had an important role in the Indian economy, resulting in a hybrid system where state-owned entities co-existed with a regulated private sector (Kaushik, 1997 ; Li & Nair, 2007 ). Even after his death in 1964, Nehru’s policies and the five-year plans were supported by several successive administrations (Dandekar, 1988 ). Yet by the early 1980s, as the success of the East Asian economies such as South Korea, Malaysia and Singapore became undeniable, some scholars and policy makers started acknowledging that India’s planned model of growth had failed (Tayeb, 1996 ). Between 1950 and 1980, India realized an average real economic growth rate of 3.5 percent – well under that of the rapidly growing East Asian economies such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. The government-dominated and over-regulated system had led to inefficiencies, shortages, and corruption (Ahlstrom, 2010 ; Ahlstrom et al., 2004 ; DeLong, 2003 ).

1980s reforms

India made some attempts at economic reform starting in the mid-1980s (Rosen, 1992 ). Although the Indian middle-class welcomed the reforms as it led to increased choices in consumer markets such as autos, consumer electronics and packaged goods, the same reforms received stiff resistance from the leaders steeped in socialist, nationalist, or communist ideologies as well as from business leaders who had profited from the Nehruvian protectionist regime. These interest groups stalled the reforms (Kohli, 1989 ).

1991: The second attempt at reforms

In 1991, Narasimha Rao was elected to serve as prime minister. Rao nominated the Cambridge- and Oxford-trained economist Manmohan Singh as finance minister in his new administration.

The Gulf War of 1991 led to declining remittances from Indian expatriates in the Middle East, and rising cost of importing oil. As a result, the Rao government faced a severe foreign exchange reserve crisis. The crisis led to an assistance from the IMF, which imposed several terms and conditions for structural reforms. Rao and Singh used the crisis to justify the introduction of far-reaching multi-faceted economic reforms that continued through the 1990s despite changes in administration (Bajpai, 2002 ). These reforms included initiatives in the following area (Srinivasan, 2003 ): lowered tax rates, subsidies (especially for fuel, fertilizer, electricity), reformed banking system and capital markets, opening of reserved sectors to private business, reduced controls on capacity creation, production and prices, market-determined exchange rate, diluted import controls by reducing tariffs, eased restrictions on portfolio and direct investment, and privatization and sale of state-owned firms.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s accelerating economic development provided further legitimacy to a more market-based economy; yet legacies from the past continued to hinder the reforms (Bardhan, 2006 ).

Appendix 2: Brief summary of articles on strategy in Indian context

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Nair, A., Khobdeh, M.S., Oksoy, A. et al. A review of strategic management research on India. Asia Pac J Manag 40 , 1341–1392 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-022-09820-1

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Published : 28 April 2022

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s10490-022-09820-1

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