Determinants of company competitiveness – analysis of selected factors differentiation

Abstract

The paper presents selected results of a survey conducted in 2018 among production companies located in Poland. The results were obtained at the first stage of the study, during which 132 questionnaires were collected. The aim of the paper is to present the results of companies’ self-assessment regarding the selected competitiveness determinants. The paper, both in its theoretical and empirical part, is focused on three dimensions of competitiveness, i.e. competitive potential, competitive strategy and competitive position. In order to achieve the stated objective, the study used the results of the self-assessment of companies regarding their competitive position, both compared to competing companies from the country and abroad. Additionally, the paper shows the results of the assessment of the significance of selected elements of competitive potential, selected competitive objectives, as well as the applied measures of competitiveness in the examined companies. In the following part of the paper, non-parametric Mann-Whitney and Kruskal-Wallis tests were applied to examine the differentiation of assessments of the competitive position of companies, both in comparison to competition in the country and abroad, regarding selected characteristics of companies. The following factors were considered as potential variables that could differentiate the given responses: the size of enterprises, the spatial scope of business activity and the level of export in sales. The fact of having implemented quality and environmental management systems was also considered as an additional variable. Most of these variables turned out to have statistically significantly differentiated the assessment of the competitive position of companies. The scale of the entity's activity, its openness to foreign markets, as well as system solutions, such as standardized management systems (ISO 9001, ISO 14001), were not without significance for the assessment of the competitive position of companies.