The impact of relative organizational capabilities as firm resources on patterns of strategic and tactical choices of strategic engineering groups

This dissertation investigates how integrative firm resources lead to strategy development in medical groups. The strategy model merges the current firm resources with the process of strategy development into actual strategy content. The study of strategy content is based on the concept of strategic engineers. Strategic engineers concentrate on maximizing efficiency in the organization.

The process of strategy development centers on organizational priorities as intended strategic choices and organizational actions as tactical choices. By combining the process and content of strategy, a new model is developed that suggests that not all strategic engineers are equal.

However, rather than performance as the dependent variable, this model uses strategy as the dependent variable. The firm resource literature suggests that firm resources are key to gaining competitive advantage in an industry. Finding that different types of firm resources lead to different types of engineers may be a precursor to explaining differences in performance, although this study does not address performance of the organization.