The moderating effect of human resource management strategy on the relationship between e-business strategies and competitive advantage in Jordanian commercial banks

Competitive advantage has mostly been defined and conceptualized based on financial measures. There is record of few, or no, empirical investigations of non-financial measures that investigated banking competitive advantage, despite its necessity in measuring the associated intangible values. There is also a need for the conceptualization of banking industry’s competitive advantage in view of aligning it with the influence of strategy implementation, especially technology-based business-oriented strategies. These technology-based business-oriented strategies are thus, in this study, conceptualized as e-business strategy, and investigated as e-commerce, e-marketing, e-operations, and E-system. These are hitherto traditional business strategies that can now be implemented through the use of technology due to the emergence of information technology and the evolution of digital age. In the same light, human resource management strategy which has been reported as one of the antecedent factors of competitive advantage, with direct and significant relationship with organizational performance, is also reported to be of insignificant relationship with competitive strategy and competence. Also, there have been limited, if any, studies that investigated the impact of e-business strategies on the Jordanian Commercial Banks competitive advantage, and also with the consideration of the moderating role of human resource management strategy due to its previous inconsistent roles. This study attends to these practical and theoretical gaps using a quantitative methodology that involves hypotheses testing with data collected from 168 from the top management of 10 Jordanian banking using systematic random sampling. The data is to investigate the positive influence of e-commerce, e-marketing, e-operation and E-system on competitive advantage and analyzed using Partial Least Square-Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). Being a higher order construct model, the positive influence of the sub-dimensions of each of the exogenous constructs; e-commerce (sales and purchase), e-marketing (internet marketing and mobile marketing), e-operation (data analysis, audit and reporting) and E-system (ERP, intelligent system, knowledge-based system) on competitive advantage are also investigated. The findings, based on 11 accepted and 3 rejected hypotheses, showed that (a) e-marketing, e-operations, and E-system positively influence competitive advantage, (b) sales, mobile marketing, data analysis, Audit and Reporting, ERP, intelligent system and knowledge-based system positively influence competitive advantage, and (c) human resource management strategy moderates the influence on competitive advantage. This study, therefore, recommended that continuous product and service development; responsiveness to customers; and increase in customer’s base can be used as non-financial measures of banking competitive advantage. Also, in specifics, The Jordanian government, as an extension of the banking sector players, should further extend its digital bridge and internet penetration so as to improve banking service experience by the banks’ customers.