The purpose of the article “Competitive Advantage the Unknown concept” by Christos
Sigalas was primarily to “investigate the empirically managers awareness regarding the concept
of competitive advantage”. As the word competitive advantage usually alludes to confusion to all
different levels of business, even though competitive advantage has been a major foundation in
strategic management. There is a plethora of misconceptions about competitive advantage as
there are numerous definitions, all withholding different meanings and understandings. But a
vast majority of people with business ideals, agree that competitive advantage is what
distinguishes the particular company with their surrounding competition. Referring to services or
products that allocate to their success. The very first scholar who attempted to define the
competitive advantage was Ansoff. Ansoff wanted to define competitive advantage as a “isolated
characteristics or particular properties of individual product markets which give a firm a strong
competitive position”. But competitive advantage was introduced to strategic business strategy
by Porters book of “competitive advantage”. Since then many scholars have engaged in different
research and discussions about the definition of competitive advantage. Hence that being the
reason this research paper designed a filed email survey as their research method. The field
survey took place in Greece and included all the economic sectors using email mode. Since this
was solely made to investigate managers awareness of competitive advantage, two variables took
place. The first variable was the self-awareness if the participating managers firms had a
competitive advantage in their fields. The second variable was a perceived measure of
competitive advantage. The results of this research paper from the survey were examined using
both the quantitative and qualitative data analyses. The results were a staggering high percent of
forty two percent of managers were not able to identify competitive advantage. While others
were able to overestimate their company’s ability of competitive advantage.
The strengths of this article is the overall level of research that went into it to make it.
Starting from the overall beginning of this paper, it went into a deep level of depth of the actual
confusion that managers and the education system has with understanding competitive
advantage. Also shares how misfortunate it is that throughout its long history and traditions that
the understating of competitive advantage is widely misunderstood. I think the weakness of this
research article would be how they tested their findings. I think they should have added other test
to implement throughout their research to have a more vast data to overview. They could have
implemented a study of how all the managers they had previously tested, observed their different
traits of their specific field to see what they have in common and in different with competitive
advantage. This could show the difference of how, and why they answered the way they did. A
couple things that stood out to me was model they used to survey the managers. I would have
used a different model, because of the delay that it would take to everyone to answer. Also, the
results stood out to me. I didn’t expect the vast majority of managers in business field to not be
able to identify competitive advantage. This research paper was very to the point about the
research and their results, I wasn’t unclear on anything reading this project.
Reference
Sigalas, Christos. (2015). Competitive advantage: the known unknown concept. Management
Decision. 53. 2004-2016. 10.1108/MD-05-2015-0185.