تاثیر خطر محیط زیست، استراتژی سازمانی و ساختار سرمایه بر عملکرد شرکت: بررسی تجربی شرکت های رستوران

The co-alignment process has been used in hospitality strategy as a framework to explain strategic orientation of firms. In this study, using a sample from the US restaurant industry, the authors test the simultaneous impact of surrogates from constructs identified as part of the co-alignment model, i.e. environment, strategy, and structure, on firm performance. Results indicate that a significant variance in firm performance is explained by the variables from the foregoing constructs of the co-alignment model. The robustness of this study provides restaurant firms’ managers a basis to evaluate their firms’ strategic orientation vis-à-vis its impact on firm performance.

In the research domain that contains the study of firms from a strategic management perspective, firm strategy formulation and implementation decisions have been pointed out to be the key in explaining superior firm performance (Thompson et al., 2004; Hill and Jones, 1995). Conceptually, this relationship is purported to be within the paradigm that explains the effect of environment, strategy, and structure, on firm performance (Olsen et al., 1998). In this study, the authors use this underpinning to test surrogates from the corporate finance literature that represent the foregoing constructs in terms of their simultaneous effects on firm performance. Inasmuch as incremental research is essential in building theory in a given field of study, it is essential that empirical tests are used as a basis to verify the underpinnings of theoretical models to confirm such ex ante conceptualizations. While prior studies in hospitality research have not tested the relationships among the constructs proposed in this effort, the justification to explore such relationships is based on the fact that it provides practitioners with a framework to view firm performance-related variables from a strategic perspective. Moreover, scholars in mainstream business research domains, i.e. strategic management and corporate finance, have not delved into testing such a model that confirms the empirical veracity of the constructs in being able to explain firm performance. The authors make such an attempt in this paper while positing that the variance in firm performance can be better understood by using surrogates from the three constructs, i.e. environment risk, corporate strategy, and capital structure. The surrogates from these constructs are used to explain the proportion of variance in firm performance. Results indicate that a significant variance in firm performance is explained by the independent variables. In fact, the robustness of the empirical findings provides practitioners with a basis to evaluate their firms’ strategic orientation from a financial perspective while lending support to the idea of organizational alignment or fit. The following sections report a historical perspective on past efforts and theoretical underpinnings followed by a description of the constructs/variables and the interrelationships between them, hypothesis development and testing, and description of results, while concluding with the implications for practitioners and future research.