RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

Factors promoting competitiveness in tea manufacturing firms: case study of tea… 109
of the description of the context. Therefore, the firms were selected through purposive sampling
as suggested by Patton and Appelbaum (2003).
Data was collected mainly from two regions of tea low grown areas namely; Southern
and Sabaragamuwa province. Three tea manufacturing firms were selected from each region.
Selection was done using the records of tea manufacturers issued by the Tea Board. The criteria
were leading tea manufacturers which having high net sales average (NSA) in each region
and continued for different types of innovations (Appendix 1).
Data collection
Unique strength of case study method is its ability to deal with variety of evidence for
evaluation (Eisenhardt, 1989; Patton & Appelbaum, 2003; Yin, 2003). Structured interviews,
documents and observation were used as main data sources of this study. Structured interviews
were conducted by personal visit by the researcher at each company location. For further
clarifications, some interviews were conducted by over the phone as required.
Filed work was carried out during one month period and time duration of interviews was
range from one and half to two hours. In addition to the interviews process, documents and
other data were gathered in each time. Further, plant visit was done in order to observe the
consistency of production process and management with data gathered through interviews.
Data analysis
Analytical induction method was adopted for analyzing six cases, which is a method of
extending or refining exiting theories by constantly comparing them with typical cases (Yan
& Gray, 1994). In the study context, this method engages with investigative the data from
the six cases of tea manufacturing firms and determining if they in shape with preliminary
theoretical model or whether the model required to modified. As explained by Parkhe (1993),
analysis was started with the preliminary model and then compared each case with preliminary
model and modified the model in view of the findings for each successive case.
Results and discussion
In this section, the revised model of factors promoting competitiveness of tea manufacturing
firms in Sri Lanka will be presented. The model was developed in stepwise manner
by starting with preliminary model and then revising the model as shown in Figure 2 after
analysis of each case. As a result, revise model represents the empirically grounded theoretical
model of factors promoting competitiveness of tea manufacturing firms in developing
country like Sri Lanka. English letters A to F were randomly allocated to identify the tea manufacturing
firms and to maintain their anonymity.
Innovation as key of competitiveness
The adoption of innovation is intended to contribute the organization’s effectiveness and
competitiveness thereby helps to adapt the new conditions in its external environment. All
tea manufacturing firms in these case studies understand that innovation is very imperative