Exam 4: Internal Environmental Analysis and Competitive Advantage

The three subsystems that support service delivery by ensuring an inviting and supportive atmosphere, an effective organization, and sufficient resources such as finances, highly qualified staff, information systems, and appropriate facilities and equipment are:

Capability is the ability of an organization to deploy resources and competencies.

The competitive relevance of an organizational strength is a function of value, rareness, imitability, and sustainability.

An organizational weakness that is of high value to stakeholders, possessed by competitors, easily corrected, and such that competitors can sustain their advantage presents a competitive disadvantage.

An organizational strength that is of high value, rare, difficult to imitate, and easy to sustain contributes to long-term competitive advantage.

Organizational strengths must have value, be rare, difficult to imitate, and sustainable in order to create competitive advantage.

How does an organization achieve a competitive advantage?

In the resource-based view of strategy, valuable, expensive, difficult-to-copy resources contribute to sustainable competitive advantage.

Complete the following statement. Sustained competitive advantage is the result of:

Competitive advantage is created within the organization in the form of strengths that are important in the internal environment.

The strategic implications of the competitively relevant strength of "entrepreneurial culture" are history, and performance has established a firm reputation for innovation.

The organizational structure increases patient satisfaction by effectively and efficiently facilitating the service delivery.

The three elements of service delivery are:

Under what circumstances are organizational weaknesses competitively relevant?

Stretch is accomplished through resource leveraging or systematically achieving the most possible from the available resources.

Synergy is created by combining complementary resources, competencies, and capabilities.

The more often that a particular resource, competency, or capability is used, the greater is the potential for leveraging.

How many organizations develop sustainable competitive advantages by being extraordinarily competent at converting ordinary resources and skills into genuine strategic assets?

Only financial resources may be leveraged by an organization.