Strategic Consistency, Flexibility and Reactors: A Comparative Analysis

There is debate in the literature that whether firms should adapt consistent or flexible strategy for competitive advantage? The proponents of both arguments provide substantial evidence in their favour. This study aims to investigate the strategy-performance relationship in this context using financial data of joint stock firms from textile sector of Pakistan applying Miles and Snow typology. The results show that majority of the firms are adapting strategic consistency. Firms with consistency in their strategies produced better results than firms following flexible strategies. Both consistent and flexible strategies outperformed reactors. Although, there is variation in the performance of the strategic types due to the variation in firm size, the effect of firm size is not significant.