The Effect of Organizational Resources on Competitive Advantage in Hotels: Mediation and Moderation Analysis. The Case of North Cyprus

This study considers the effects of organizational capabilities on outcomes such as customer relationship and competitive advantage in the hotel industry. This further evaluates the moderating effect of market dynamism between organizational capabilities and customer relationship building. This study also examines the mediating effect of customer relationship building between organizational capabilities and competitive advantage. A questionnaire was designed to collect the data from hotel employees in North Cyprus. Based on judgmental sampling method, questionnaires were distributed among respondents (in both English and Turkish). To ensure data was collected from employees who have enough knowledge, experience, and information to answer the questions, this research only targeted hotel managers, supervisors, senior personnel, and employees with at least two years of work tenure at the relevant hotel, who had also connection with customers. Confirmatory factor analysis was applied to check the convergent and discriminant validity. Furthermore, a set of reliability tests was applied to check internal consistency of scale items. To ensure that common method bias did not distort the result of this research, Harman’s single factor test, common marker variable technique, and common latent factor test were conducted (Podsakoff et al., 2003). To test the proposed hypotheses, correlation and regression analyses were conducted to evaluate the relationships among the variables. Mediation and moderation effects have been checked with bootstrapping analysis. The findings supported the hypotheses, indicating that organizational capabilities are antecedents of customer relationship quality and in turn competitive advantage. The mediating effect of customer relationship building among organizational capabilities and competitive advantage was also approved. Results also confirmed that market dynamism plays a moderating effect on relationship between organizational capabilities and customer relationship building