Organisational Capabilities and their Influence on Strategic Performance in Real Estate Development

In today's dynamic and uncertain environments organisations are facing constant challenges in terms of achieving and maintaining their competitive advantage. These new circumstances are compelling organizations to analyse, integrate, build and reconfigure their resources and organisational capabilities in order to sustain and improve their strategic performance. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of organisational capabilities (OC) for the strategic performance of real estate development companies, which are mainly project-based organisations operating in dynamic and uncertain environments. Before empirically exploring the relationship between organisational capabilities and firm performance, a conceptual model for organisational capabilities based on the resource-based-view (RBW) is developed and applied in Real Estate. Based on the developed OC-model it is hypothesised that those certain organisational capabilities, which are embedded in the organization itself and developed through projects and people capabilities, influence the strategic performance of real estate development companies and thus lead to competitive advantage and higher firm performance. As real estate developers operate in highly dynamic and uncertain markets, our empirical model also introduces the control variable environmental uncertainty which, depending on the target market, influences further the choice of strategy. The model is empirically evaluated by using data from real estate development companies in Austria, Germany and Switzerland and tested by applying hierarchical regression analysis.