Competitive Analysis or Stakeholder Pre-Commitments? How Firms' Strategic Decision-Making Choices Mediate the Relationship Between its Strategic Posture and Digitalization

This article aims to understand the influence of strategic posture of a firm on its decision-making orientation related to competitors and partners, and evaluates if such decision-making orientation of firms mediate the relationship between a firm's strategic posture and digitalization. The article uses partial least squares based structural equation modeling technique on primary data from 100 enterprises belonging to manufacturing and electronics sector operating from India. Based on the analysis, the article empirically establishes the linkage between a firm's strategic posture and its decision-making preferences in the contexts related to engaging with competitors and partners, taking digitalization as context. Next, it extends available knowledge on firms’ decision-making literature by establishing that a firm's decision-making orientation related to its competitors and partners has direct influence on its degree of digitalization. Finally, it empirically deduces that in the context of digitalization of firms, market-based analysis is the dominant decision-making paradigm as against obtaining stakeholder partnerships or precommitments.