Top managers’ dynamic capabilities, value creation and appropriation. An empirical analysis on the aerospace sector

This aim of this paper is to analyze the issue of value creation and value appropriation through the identification top managers’ dynamic capabilities, with an empirical application in a particular industry, the aerospace sector. Therefore, the study focuses on top managers’ dynamic capabilities, more or less firm-specific, their impact on firm’s performance, getting to single out how much of the created value is appropriated by top managers in front of the other stakeholders. This objective contributes to corroborate the theoretical concept of dynamic capabilities with an in depth literature review on the issue, in order to identify the main research gaps. Then the empirical analysis tries to verify the theoretical framework with reference to the aerospace industry. This is a knowledge-based intensive, proactive, agile, lean, and tailor-made oriented industry. Such features require high level of top managers’ dynamic capabilities, especially the firm specific ones. The empirical observations suggest that it is useful to distinguish among dynamic capabilities and in particular the aspects of causal ambiguity and social complexity, proposed through the VRIO framework, seem to be relevant in the process of value creation for aerospace firms.