university tunku abdul rahman

SURVEY OF COMPETITIVE INTELLIGENCE (CI) OF MALAYSIAN MANUFACTURERS

As CI establishes itself as business discipline in its own right, a growing interest has been shown in competitive intelligence amongst academics and practitioners alike (Bernhardt, 1996). The successes as disclosed by companies that practice CI have prompted other organizations to have CI on board as well thinking that CI will do the same for their organizations. This is far from the truth. Therefore this research will incorporate culture, structure and leadership and develop and test hypotheses on the extent to which these factors affect the attitude towards CI that leads to CI use and ultimately the impact of CI use on the bottom line of the organizations.

In developing the typology of CI use in UK, Wright et al. (2002) mentioned that the existence of a management style, culture and structure which encourage trust, facilitate communication, encourage the easy flow of information are the overriding influence on successful CI activity. Simon and Kern (2001) were aware of this and also highlighted organizational structure, organizational culture and leadership in their suggestion for CI to gain a proper footing in the organization. Besides, the understanding of these three variables can be leveraged to support CI, and to break down barriers that inhibit CI activities. The work of Wright et al. also gave due recognition of the importance of the three on the attitude towards CI and CI use. Finally the impact of CI use is linked to organizational performance.

Cluster sampling of 1000 companies listed as members of Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers (FMM) will be the respondents. Questionnaires will then be sent through mail. The questionnaire adopted and combined the existing survey instruments developed in other studies (Cameron & Quinn, 1998; Dastmalchian, 2000; Menon & Wilcox 1994, Le Bon & Merunka 1998; Teo & Choo 2001). Since the various dimensions of variables tested in this research are categorical in nature; cross-tabulation tests, chi-square analysis, and Pearson correlation analysis are carried out to measure the significant association between the variables.