Causal Relationship of Competitive Advantage with Conflict Sources and the Role of Mediator of Flexibility of Human Resources in the Sport Products Industry

The purpose of this study was causal relationship between competitive advantage and conflicting resources in the sport products industry. The research method was causal that was done in the form of field. A research sample was selected among managers and sport production units’ owners of Tehran. The instruments used in the research were Reyhani competitive advantage questionnaire (2015), Khapoor et al organizational conflict inventory questionnaire (2015) and Wright & Snell Human Resources Flexibility Questionnaire (1998) which after verifying its validity and reliability, was distributed among the samples. Descriptive statistics to analyze the data were used and for presenting the measurement model, SPSS and Lisrer softwares were used. The results showed that the model has a suitable fit and it has also been shown that the competitive advantage factor with influence coefficient 0.38 and influence coefficient 0.7 has a direct and significant effect on the flexibility of human resources and conflicting resources and also organizational flexibility factor with influence coefficient 0.27 has a direct and significant effect on conflicting resources. Therefore, considering results, it is suggested that managers and sport goods companies authorities try to consider intra-organizational issues such as the effectiveness of costs and time that causes to make the advantage competitive so that they can turn the company's temporary competitive advantage into a sustainable competitive advantage and for increasing the human resources flexibility of these companies, managers should try to employ staff who have the sufficient skills to do the job.