Competitive blind spots in an institutional field
By: NG, Desmond
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Contributor(s): WESTGREN, Randall | SONKA, Steven.
Material type: 
ArticlePublisher: Bognor Regis : Wiley-Blackwell, April 2009Strategic Management Journal 30, 4, p. 349-369Abstract: Unlike institutional or macro-cultural explanations of competition, competition need not be viewed as a shared social reality. Instead, competition can be interpreted differently by multiple stakeholders of a value chain. However, due to managerial blind spots, such various interpretations of competition are less than apparent to management. Yet explanations of such blind spots are not well documented. Hence, to explain such blind spots, a conceptual model based on overconfidence biases is developed in which managers develop a self-centered view of competition that blinds them from the competitive beliefs of their value chain customers. Differences in competitive beliefs, thus, arise and are argued to contribute to such managerial blind spots. Furthermore, to empirically examine such managerial blind spots, the competitive perceptions held by various members of a swine genetics value chain were surveyed. Through cluster and MANOVA analyses, this study shows that, unlike institutional/macro-cultural explanations of competition, these members do not share a common consensus of the key attributes and groupings of competition. The implications and contributions of this study are also discussed.
Unlike institutional or macro-cultural explanations of competition, competition need not be viewed as a shared social reality. Instead, competition can be interpreted differently by multiple stakeholders of a value chain. However, due to managerial blind spots, such various interpretations of competition are less than apparent to management. Yet explanations of such blind spots are not well documented. Hence, to explain such blind spots, a conceptual model based on overconfidence biases is developed in which managers develop a self-centered view of competition that blinds them from the competitive beliefs of their value chain customers. Differences in competitive beliefs, thus, arise and are argued to contribute to such managerial blind spots. Furthermore, to empirically examine such managerial blind spots, the competitive perceptions held by various members of a swine genetics value chain were surveyed. Through cluster and MANOVA analyses, this study shows that, unlike institutional/macro-cultural explanations of competition, these members do not share a common consensus of the key attributes and groupings of competition. The implications and contributions of this study are also discussed.
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