Orienting toward sales growth? Decomposing the variance attributed to three fundamental organizational strategic orientations

Abstract

While firm strategic orientations have received considerable attention, most research has focused on singular orientations without considering their complementarity for firm's outcomes. In this study, we decompose the unique and complementary variance of several strategic orientations – market (MO), entrepreneurial (EO), and learning orientation (LO) – on firm sales growth. Our investigation of the individual unique effects of these orientations reveals that, within our cross-national random sample of 221 firms from Finland and Russia, sales growth is principally driven by EO. Second, our results show, that the complementary or shared effects of EO, MO, and LO explain a significant portion of the variance in sales growth. Building upon past research, we offer evidence that a higher-order construct- proactive learning culture- is supported at the intersection of these fundamental strategic orientations with important implications for future scholarship examining multiple strategic orientations.