Capabilities in the Area of Flexible Activities and Market Competitiveness – the Perspective of Silesian Enterprises

Abstract

Theoretical background: The business environment is a range of conditions and determinants that shape the functioning of enterprises on the market. Hence, the ability of enterprises to flexible behavior or actions in the area of the organization's functioning becomes important. The idea of flexibility of action in the process of managing enterprises consists in such actions, thanks to which the organization can easily and quickly adapt to changes taking place in its business environment. It can be indicated that dynamic capabilities are specific capabilities of key importance, including organizational resources, which ensure achieving competitive advantage in the changing and turbulent business environment of the enterprise. Flexibility is therefore a property that allows the organization to cope with changes in the environment, which is why a feature such as flexibility is desirable by every enterprise regardless of its size and business profile. An enterprise characterized by the capability to take flexible actions is open to all changes, and proper management of these changes is necessary not only to gain a competitive advantage. Achieving competitive advantage requires constant change, adaptation, and flexibility, which is reflected in the level of capability to take flexible actions in the areas of the organization's functioning.

Purpose of the article: The aim of the article is to identify the capabilities in the area of flexible organizational activities that influence the growth of the competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises.

Research methods: The inference is based on the results of our own study on a group of 141 small and medium-sized Silesian manufacturing enterprises. The proper study was conducted in 2022 and was preceded by a pilot study. During the study, a research tool was used, i.e., an original survey questionnaire. The survey questionnaire was subjected to a reliability assessment. After formal assessment, the collected data was subjected to statistical analysis, including the use of descriptive statistics and nonparametric statistics.

Main findings: The results of the study showed that the declared level of capability to activities flexibly in the surveyed companies was not high in general, at 3.84 on a 5-point scale. The highest level of capability to activities flexibly was declared by the surveyed companies in the operational area. The lowest level of capability to activities flexibly was indicated by companies in the financial area. It turns out that the level of the studied capability to activities flexibly increased significantly after the COVID-19 pandemic. The study showed that as many as 82% of respondents stated that before the pandemic the level of the studied capability was rather or definitely lower. It turned out that nearly 69% of Silesian small and medium-sized manufacturing enterprises know their company's market competition well or very well. The results of the study showed that surveyed enterprises assess their level of market competitiveness, on a 5-point scale, at a level of only 3.35 in relation to enterprises competing with them, which is quite low and does not differ significantly in groups of enterprises due to their size. The results of the analysis indicated that there is a statistically significant positive relationship between the capability to perform flexible actions in general and the level of market competitiveness. The analysis of the correlation of variables, using the Kendall's tau statistic, also showed that there is a statistically significant positive relationship between all the distinguished areas of flexibility of enterprises' actions and the level of their competitiveness. In all cases, this relationship is weak but, as should be pointed out, statistically significant. The highest value of the Kendall-Tau index occurs in the case of operational flexibility and the lowest, interestingly, in the case of technological flexibility and market competitiveness.