Where does competitive aggressiveness collide?

A firm's intensity of effort to outperform rivals, marked by a combative, head-to-head stance toward competitors rather than toward opportunity. Competitive aggressiveness is one of the five dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation in Lumpkin and Dess's 1996 account, where it captures how forcefully a firm answers competitive threats, through price cutting, imitation, or direct challenge. In 2001 Lumpkin and Dess separated it from proactiveness and found the two pay off at different times: aggressiveness helped in later, hostile stages of an industry, proactiveness earlier. The referent is a firm's stance toward its rivals, rated by an executive, and the direction is reactive and combative, which is what sets it apart from the opportunity-facing dimensions.[1][2]

Unit

A firm's combative stance toward rivals

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Executive ratings of forceful, head-to-head competitive response, as an entrepreneurial-orientation subscale

The total volume and complexity of the competitive actions a firm carries out against its rivals, read from what the firm does rather than from what an executive says. Ferrier defined and measured competitive aggressiveness this way in 2001, using structured content analysis of a firm's stream of moves, price changes, new products, marketing campaigns, and capacity shifts, and found that firms taking more numerous and more varied actions eroded rivals' market share and better defended their own. The referent is a firm's observed behaviour over time, counted from the record, not a self-rated posture. It shares the name and the rivalrous target with the entrepreneurial-orientation meaning and differs in being an action count rather than a survey.[3]

Unit

A firm's stream of competitive actions over time

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Structured content analysis counting the number, variety, and timing of a firm's competitive moves

An athlete's disposition to use aggression and to feel anger in pursuit of advantage during competition. Maxwell and Moores built the Competitive Aggressiveness and Anger Scale in 2007, a twelve-item measure with an aggressiveness subscale and an anger subscale, to capture a trait that predicts rule-breaking and hostile acts in sport. The referent is one competitor's stable tendency, and the object is an opponent in a game, not a rival firm. The phrase competitive aggressiveness is identical to the strategy term, and the construct is unrelated: one is a company's market behaviour, the other a person's readiness to transgress under provocation.[4]

Unit

An athlete's trait tendency toward aggression and anger in competition

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

CAAS: twelve self-report items across an aggressiveness subscale and an anger subscale