Creating a Sustainable Competitive Advantage in the Hotel Sector (The integrated approach of agency theory and Resource Based View)

This paper studied sustainable competitive advantage in competencies required by the hotel staff to ensure the permanent competitiveness of the hotels. The Resource-based View emphasizes the organizations need to attend internal resources, especially human resources. The agency approach emphasizes on staff role-play and their interaction within the framework. This research was a developmental-applied and descriptive-quantitative survey. For data collection, we distributed a questionnaire of 73 questions among a random selection of 260 individuals, including the managers and the staff of five-star hotels in Tehran. Using the structural equation modeling, we analyzed the data in both the measuring model section and the structural section to examine the technical features and the research hypothesis, respectively. Findings showed positive and meaningful impacts of the action-framework variable on the competent actor, and the competent actor showed the same impacts on creating a sustainable competitive advantage in the forms of productive, process, and administrative innovations. Based on the results, there was a relationship between the factors of action framework (i.e., mental welfare, affirmative freedom grant, knowledge sharing, revolutionary leadership, organizational equality, providing psychological conventions) and inter-personal, intra-personal skills and managerial skills and organizational competence of the staff. Finally, the hotel managers in Iran were recommended to provide the groundwork for staff role-play and to design job-tests and performance-appraisal standards, based on the skills and competencies identified in this study.