earticle

영어

The research in strategic management field regards environment, resource, synergy as three main factors to explain the performance of the firm. The first research stream explores the relationship between environment and performance and investigates the effect of environment on organizational survival, progress, and profit based on the logic of environmental determinism such as contingency theory, organizational ecology, and industrial organization. The second research stream contends with the logic of resource-based view that performance is influenced not by external environment but by internal resources. The third research stream is interested in the synergistic effect on performance and based on the logic of diversification research that a firm with high relatedness among its SBUs has more chances to create synergy to attain high performance. Each of the three factors includes broad concerns and issues enough to build its own research stream and the considerable and diverse issues have been discussed within the factor. But little attention is given to the issues that lies across the factors. Being aware of this limitation, this study seeks to integrate the three different factors from three different theories. I first introduce the three major theories of environmental determinism, resource-based view, and diversification research that explains the performance of the firm, suggest environmental uncertainty, resource level, and inter-SBU relatedness as main variables and analyze their respective effect on firm’s performance to verify the efficacy of the theories. I also interpret the interaction effect between the variables to integrate the theories. According to empirical results, resource level and inter-SBU relatedness affect performance in positive ways, but environmental uncertainty does not. The interaction of environmental uncertainty and resource level affects performance in a negative way, which means a firm with abundant resources in stable environment tends to be a high performer. The interaction of environmental uncertainty and inter-SBU relatedness affects performance in a positive way. It means that the effect of inter-SBU resource sharing, the influence of resource sharing based on inter-SBU relatedness on performance, decreases in stable environment, but increases in uncertain environment. The interaction of resource level and inter-SBU relatedness does not affect performance, which is an unexpected result. It is somewhat exceptional in that there is no combination effect between them while their respective effects are valid. The contribution of the study is that I verify the efficacy of the theories that explain the performance of the firm in strategic management field by presenting environmental uncertainty, resource level, and inter-SBU relatedness as the three main variables and by investigating their influences on performance and that I attempt to integrate the theories by analyzing the interaction effects between variables. Some studies include the issues of searching for the fit between strategy and environment, but they pursue only the integration of variables, not theories, and most studies do not consider the variables or the theories of synergy in integrating or compromising arguments. By considering the inter-organizational aspect as well as the internal and the external aspects of an organization, this study covers the wider range of issues than prior studies.

한국어

본 논문은 기업성과를 설명하는 세 가지 중요한 이론인 환경결정론, 자원기반관점, 다각화이론의 소개와 통합의 이슈를 다룬다. 이를 위해 각 이론에서 주요 변수로 사용하는 환경불확실성, 자원보유수준, 사업부 간 자원관련성이 개별적으로 기업성과에 미치는 영향을 살펴봄으로써 각 이론적 타당성을 실증적으로 검증하는 한편, 변수들 간의 상호작용효과를 분석함으로써 이론들 간의 통합을 모색하였다. 실증분석 결과, 자원보유 수준과 사업부 간 자원관련성은 기업성과에 긍정적인 영향을 미친 반면, 환경불확실성은 유의적인 영향을 미치지 않았다. 또한 환경불확실성과 자원보유수준의 상호작용은 기업성과에 부정적인 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타나, 안정적인 환경에 처해 있고 많은 자원을 가진 기업일수록 높은 성과를 달성한다는 결과를 얻을 수 있었다. 반면에 환경불확실성과 사업부 간 자원관련성의 상호작용은 기업성과에 부정적인 영향을 미치는 것으로 나타 났는데, 이는 안정적인 환경에 처할수록 사업부 간 자원관련성이 기업성과에 미치는 영향은 미미해지는 반면, 환경불확실성이 높을수록 사업부 간 자원관련성이 기업성과에 미치는 영향이 커진다는 것을 의미한다. 마지막 으로 자원보유수준과 사업부 간 자원관련성의 상호작용은 기업성과에 유의미한 영향을 미치지 않는 것으로 나타났는데, 자원보유수준과 사업부 간 자원관련성은 개별적으로는 기업성과에 영향을 미쳤던 반면, 두 변수의 결합은 영향을 미치지 않은 것은 다소 이례적인 결과라고 할 수 있다