آیا رقابت هم نژادی برای سازمان های با فن آوری پیشرفته خوب است یا بد؟

Inter-unit competition,1 generally, evokes mixed feelings among both academicians and business executives. Executive policies promoting inter-unit competition create a double-edged sword of pressures for line managers for enhanced competitiveness. In this paper, I highlight the significance and importance of inter-unit competition in high technology organizations. I propose that the autonomy to choose market breadth facilitates and promotes inter-unit competition and that this relationship is further strengthened by evaluating units using objective criteria. In addition, I identify both internal and external conditions under which inter-unit competition may be beneficial or harmful (not beneficial) to the unit and hence, the organization. Several important theoretical and practical contributions are identified.

“Just as a lizard cuts off its tail to move on, we will have to break with the past to move forward,” says Chung Kook Hyun, a senior vice president at Samsung and so they have. They have broken through the traditional barriers of Confucian hierarchies to build a company that invests heavily in research and development and in 2004 declared $10 billion in net income on sales of $56 billion and earned a total of 100 citations at top design contests in US, Europe and Asia. Samsung that started as a low cost Korean company, has now become what Sony could once claim — the competitor with both breadth of products and the appeal of a premium brand (Brooke & Hansell, 2005). Overall, Samsung has managed to compete aggressively with long standing industry giants in the technology industry like Sony and Panasonic for consumer electronic products, Nokia and Motorola for cellular phones, Intel for memory chips and Canon for printer business (Economist, 2005). Samsung, is a good example of how a company is able “to move from the darkest shadows to the top of the tree” (Economist, 2005: 2), essentially because of the competitive organizational structure that has allowed Samsung to be one of the top three market leaders in most of their businesses. The question, however, remains — ‘should organizations follow the footsteps of Samsung to improve innovation and performance within their organizations and challenge their business units to compete both inside and outside the organization?’ In general, inter-firm competition is a well-researched and accepted phenomenon (e.g. Baum and Korn, 1996, Echols and Tsai, 2005 and Gurad and Kumaraswamy, 1993), but what about the convention that exists in the industry against inter-unit competition? Shouldn't those rules be critically analyzed to provide managers and academicians with better insights into the importance and role of inter-unit competition that face dynamic and uncertain environments with resultant pressures to innovate expeditiously? Hence, the three research questions identified in this paper are: (1) what facilitates intra-firm or inter-unit competition within high technology organizations; (2) what role does inter-unit competition play to improve unit performance and unit innovation? and (3) under what conditions is inter-unit competition beneficial or harmful? Hence, in this paper, I fill the void in existing literature by studying the facilitators of intra-firm competition and by identifying external and internal contingency factors in technologically intensive industry that are most relevant to the industry. Most of these variables have not been identified previously ( Birkinshaw, 2001, Birkinshaw and Lingblad, 2005, Fauli-Oller and Giralt, 1995 and Kalnins, 2004).

In order to gain sustained competitive advantage, firms need to focus and understand the dynamics of intra-firm competition. This will allow them to successfully develop, monitor, and evaluate the structural attributes related to managing this concept. While this subject is a dual edged sword balancing the psychological pressures for line managers between enhanced competitiveness for their unit and making decisions in the best interest of the organization, the concept definitely deserves more attention than it has previously garnered. This paper provides the framework that can help managers succeed in their industry and enhance their knowledge on the dynamics of intra-firm competition.