ACHIEVING CONGRUENCE AS A DYNAMIC CAPABILITY

A CONTINGENCY VIEW ON JAPANESE MANUFACTURING AND SERVICE INDUSTRIES

抄録

Converting knowledge into the capability to meet environmental demands is one way to develop competitive advantage. For business units, this means a continuous readjustment of the balance between mechanistic and organistic structures. Grounded on the contingency view, this paper attempts to identify, beyond the structure, the organizational mechanisms that impact new product introduction under the technology uncertainty context. First, we investigate the set of organizational mechanisms that allow for achieving new product introduction in such context. Second, because such a congruence only corresponds to a specific context, we investigate how absorptive capacity impacts as a trigger in achieving congruence. The results not only reveal the congruent organizational mechanisms, but they also show the differential impact of knowledge acquisition, knowledge assimilation, and knowledge transformation on such a congruence.