Designing a Competitive Advantage Model for Automotive Industry in Iran

Understanding sources of sustained competitive advantage for organization has become a major area of research in the field of strategic management. By reviewing its literature, sources of competitive advantage fall into three categories including environmental resources and capacity models, resource-based view, and network view. The environmental model emphasises on environmental factors such as attractiveness and structure of industries and five forces in gaining competitive advantage. But resource-based view emphasises on organizational resources, competencies and capabilities in gaining competitive advantage. In contrast network view emphasises on interorganizational relations and dynamic networks for gaining competitive advantage. Having verified that the need to integrate new and old theories seems to be greater than their apparent irreconcilability, thus this research tries to provide a jeneric framework by integrating three different views and present a contributional framework congruence for global competition. By using data gathering for auto industry and appling path analysis, research assumptions and conceptual model was tested.