Decision making mechanism in resource based theory: A literature review, synthesis, and future research

Many companies have encountered vagueness, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in formulating strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, they urgently require a decision-making mechanism to determine the resources/capabilities to achieve a competitive advantage in external environmental change. This research aims to discover publications in RBT, particularly the decision-making mechanism. The review highlighted the novelty of the decision-making mechanism of dynamic capability in RBT that the researchers had never previously reviewed. This review research enabled a systematic literature review (SLR) method embedded with bibliometric and systematic mapping study (SMS) analysis. The results provided 27 final publications, highlighting three keywords (dynamic capabilities, decision making, and enterprise resource management) and Teece and colleagues’ paper as the center of reference. The publications revealed that the decision-making mechanism covered a complex context, big data analysis and multi-criteria decision-making, dynamic, updated characteristics mechanism, and subject fields. Moreover, the publications were generally conducted in common industries, and several decision-support tools were found in the RBT. In summary, publications still need to provide more information to present the decision-making mechanism in enterprise resource management. Therefore, the proposed theoretical framework and conceptual decision-making model should be developed to follow a dynamic environment.