Thriving Through Disruption: Leveraging Strategic Agility and Top Management Team Characteristics to Drive Sustainable Competitive Advantage in the Kenyan Television Sector

Abstract

Technological advancement, changing consumer preferences, and evolving market dynamics have characterised the media landscape in Kenya. Emerging content creators and distributors are competing for revenue and consumer attention with traditional media players. The legacy television value chain that included key players like creative talent, content production, distribution and platforms, is being disrupted with the emergence of new players such as over-the-top [OTT] content streaming services. These discontinuous changes have compelled television stations to re-evaluate their customer value proposition(s) and strategic choices including their where-to-play market segments, the required management systems and capabilities, in order to survive, let alone prosper, in the digital age. Although past studies have underscored the significance of strategic agility, disruptive innovation and Top Management Team [TMT] characteristics in firm competitiveness, variations in theoretical frameworks, contextual disparities, limited replicability, and difference in sample sizes have hindered direct comparisons and generalisability across diverse geographic and social contexts. To address these gaps, this study assessed the relationship between strategic agility, disruptive innovation, TMT characteristics and Sustainable Competitive Advantage [SCA] of licensed television stations in Kenya. The theories adopted were; dynamic capabilities, resource-based view, upper echelons and disruptive innovation theories. The study was guided by the positivism research philosophy, which informed the use of a cross-sectional research design. The study did a census survey of the 210 operational free-to-air television stations licensed by the Communications Authority of Kenya. A semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect primary data from the respondents. Two respondents from each of the 210 licensed stations were picked. They included editors-in-chief, strategy directors, chief executive officers, editorial directors or chief operating officers. Findings revealed that strategic agility directly influenced SCA and disruptive innovation moderated the relationship. Characteristics of TMTs partially mediated the linkage of strategic agility and SCA. The overarching implication of this finding is that to leverage agility in strategy in dynamic markets, firms have to align their agile strategies with disruptive innovation strategies and look at the composition or attributes of top management such as educational level, tenure, age, and functional background, as enablers in deploying agile strategies in disrupted markets. Strategic agility alone cannot deliver sustained competitiveness in a rapidly changing and dynamic marketplace. Given this finding, it would be enriching for future studies to test whether other attributes of top management that were not factored in this study would yield similar outcomes. Future research should also explore additional factors that may influence SCA, such as organisational culture, emerging innovation like autonomous machines, the internet of things [IoT], artificial intelligence, blockchains, 5G networks as well as augmented and virtual reality.