Exploiting Resources for Competitive Advantage of Cooperative Organizations in Malaysia

Outstanding business performance and sustainable competitive advantage depend critically on tangible organizational resources, looking from the Resource-based view theory (Galbreath, 2004; Fahy, 2002). Lippman and Rumelt (2003) opined firms’ assets (physical or financial) hold the potential to create peak value for competitive advantage, relatively free from the threat of being replicated.  Firms are able to thwart threats by focusing on identifying and exploiting resources. This paper investigates the influence of organization’s tangible resources on cooperative's success. Content analyses of annual reports of Malaysian cooperatives testify tangible internal resources are a viable business strategy for sustained competitive advantage positively impacting performance. Keywords: Physical Resources, Cooperatives, Resource-based view (RBV) theory, Sustainability eISSN 2398-4295 © 2018. The Authors. Published for AMER ABRA cE-Bs by e-International Publishing House, Ltd., UK. This is an open-access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Peer–review under responsibility of AMER (Association of Malaysian Environment-Behaviour Researchers), ABRA (Association of Behavioural Researchers on Asians) and cE-Bs (Centre for Environment-Behaviour Studies), Faculty of Architecture, Planning & Surveying, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Malaysia.