Abstract
This qualitative study addresses an important area of Competitive Strategy. While competitive advantage has been studied in detail, the critical aspect of its decline has received scant attention. Addressing this oversight, based on the literature review and using the resource-based view (RBV) as the primary theoretical foundation, we develop a few propositions related to decline, including culture, TMT, causal ambiguity, dynamic capability, innovation, capability decay, imitation, and disruption. We conducted this study to gain insight into perceptions of decline among the leadership community. To the best of our knowledge, the existing literature lacks clarity on practitioners' perceptions of decline in drafting the firm's strategy. This is a critical gap: The leaders’ experience, background, and heuristics also play a role. If the leaders, the strata of management that define and execute the strategy themselves, do not understand and appreciate the criticality of this phenomenon, it is bound to affect the design of the firm's strategy. We used the Gioia methodology. This blend of theory and practice makes the outcome, in terms of the flow of the decline process, more applicable.