Top Management Team Characteristics and Managerial Discretion on Sustainable Competitive Advantage: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper was to assess the influence of top management characteristics and managerial discretion on sustainable competitive advantage of Chinese Multinational Corporations in Kenya. The paper used top management team characteristics as the independent variables, managerial discretion as the intervening variable and sustainable competitive advantage as the dependent variable. A null conceptual hypotheses for the research have been established which managerial discretion does not have significant intervening effect of TMT characteristics on SCA of Multinational corporations. The research employed a cross-sectional survey to gather information from the 72 Chinese Multinational Corporations in Kenya. The Chief Executive Officers, General Managers and other top management team members were interviewed from the various Chinese Multinational Corporations in Kenya. The formulated hypothesis was analyzed by the use of Chi-square. From the study findings, it emerged that the tested managerial discretion significantly intervened on TMT characteristics and SCA of CMCs since the p-value was less than 0.05. The study results are in agreement with various previous studies thus opens avenue for further studies. The findings of the research contain an implication in the respective organizations where the indicators in regard to sustainable competitive advantage should not only be used to measure constructs of customer satisfaction, differentiation and return on investment.