Discussion and conclusion
The RBV of the firm has been used in many research studies to explore the relationships between capabilities and performance results. To say that there is a relationship between capabilities and performance, however, is not sufficient. It is reasonable to ask which capabilities are most closely aligned with performance, as this may well differ across SBUs. Hambrick (1983) has implied that SBUs should continue to invest in those capabilities most beneficial to supporting their existing competencies and improving their performance. To extend this line of reasoning, we suggest that different patterns of capabilities may be associated with high levels of performance. We further argue that these patterns may be used as a basis for portraying heterogeneity via a grouping which can be empirically estimated. In this paper, we devised a constrained latent structure regression methodology to derive empirically a four clusters. Based on our methodology, we can make