Relationships as organizational resources: Examining public relations impact through its connection with organizational strategies

This study empirically examined the oft-ignored link between public relations and strategy by incorporating the resource-based view (RBV) from management literature. Thirty-three interviews with public relations managers and strategy managers in China were conducted to explore relationships as organizational resources and their contribution to strategy implementation. Within the major theoretical framework, this study found that relationships possessed these key features for resources that could lead to competitive advantages: valuable, rare, difficult to imitate, and hard to be substituted. Relationships contributed to strategy implementation in general and were used also to achieve a fit with different strategies.