INTRA-ORGANIZATIONAL COMPETITION WITHIN BUSINESS GROUPS

Business groups as one of the forms of capital concentration began to appear in developed economies from the end of the 19th century as a result of geographical expansion, diversification and the development of enterprises stimulated by industrialization. Currently, they take a significant part of the value added in the economy. In the context of institutional regulation of transactions, business groups are considered to be an intermediate structure between a pure market and a pure hierarchy. The subsidiaries within a business group enter into various interactions, partly based on market principles, and partly regulated by hierarchical coordination mechanisms. Although the main goal of this structure is cooperation of subsidiaries, in their functioning one can see the formation of relations characterized by competition. The aim of the article is to identify the perception of competition processes within business groups. It is a relatively unexplored issue, studied mainly on the example of international corporations, but of great importance for the effectiveness of the entire business group. The research was based on a sample of 121 parent companies listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange. The results of the research show that subsidiaries within a business group display competitive behavior towards their sister entities, although of low intensity. The tendency towards the prevalence of the resource competition (on the internal market) over the product and market competition (on the external market) is also visible. The research findings confirmed the existing conceptual analyses and enabled an in-depth characterization of competitive processes in business groups from the perspective of the entire group, taking into account the intensity and areas of competitive behavior.