direction of effect of competitive strategies and organizational structure on corporate performance (case study: engineering consultant firms)

using structural equation modeling, the current study aims to examine the relationship between organizational structure, competitive strategies and organizational performance with respect to the interaction between structure and competitive strategy in the engineering consulting firms. this orientation is determined with respect to the desired approach (contingency or resource based view). the study population included all engineering consulting firms in tehran district. partial least squares (pls) was used for analysis of data. after collecting the questionnaires, the data were analyzed using visualpls software. the statistical findings indicate that the resource-based model has more explanation power to express relationships between structure, competitive strategy and firm performance. therefore, the traditional approaches in which organizational structure is considered as a lateral variable and is dependent on corporate strategy can be regarded lass, instead the resource based view- in which the structure is considered as an important source of competitive advantage for strategies- can be placed in the context of our explanations.