Firm-level capabilities and sustainable competitive advantage in public hospitals of Nairobi city county, Kenya

Abstract

The dynamism of the operating hospital environment requires facilities or firms to rapidly adopt to keep its competitive advantage. It is thus essential for firms to develop innovative ways of survival through aligning the long- and short-term goals to remain competitive. Firms ought to incessantly scan the business setting either internal or extern to determine their status and relevancy notwithstanding the stiff competition from the industry. There exist myriad of capabilities that hospitals can adopt. The differ based on firm characteristics. Thence, capabilities help in exploiting the existing opportunities and develop sustained advantages. To this end, identification, and configuration of capabilities within a firm makes them accomplish their goal in a differentiated way than the competitors. This study aimed at determining the influence of firm level capabilities on sustainable competitive advantage in Public Hospitals of Nairobi City County, Kenya. A cross sectional research design was adopted in this study. Using primary data which was obtained through a semi-structured data capture form. The data collected was entered and analyzed using the Statistical Software for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25. To determine the relationship between the study variables, inferential statistics was applied. The findings were abridged using percentages, and frequency distribution tables. Findings revealed that firm level capabilities influence sustainable competitive advantage through adoption of human resources, managerial and strategic intent, technological advancement and learning capability. The overall regression results imply that there is a positive and significant relationship between firm level capabilities have on sustainable competitive advantage in Public Hospitals of Nairobi City County. As such, an improvement in firm level capabilities would lead to a corresponding improvement in sustainable competitive advantage in Public Hospitals of Nairobi City County, Kenya. It was concluded that for organizations to achieve desired performance, the firm level capabilities, and the resources available, must interact positively with the stakeholder requirements to remain sustainable. As a result of constant change in the world, it was also found out that the firm capabilities must continuously adapt to the environment. The study recommended that public hospitals in Nairobi City County should continue investing on the identified capabilities with a balanced capability mix to realize sustainable competitive advantage.