The article is mainly concerned with causal ambiguity and how it creates barriers in limitations.

Focus is mainly on resource deployment and on ambiguity in skill which are the sources of advantage. The article also discusses that how firm can sustain advantage by reinvestment in ambiguous competencies to maintain their barriers to imitation. Twofold objective: To investigate the relationship between causally ambiguous competencies and barriers to imitation and thus to develop a theory that supports the concept of competitive advantage sustainability.

Article has four main parts; In first part it considers the three well established concepts of competency, competitive advantage and causal ambiguity. In second part it proposes three characteristics that can generate causal ambiguity i.e., tacitness, complexity, and specificity. Third part builds upon the two to consider decay in barriers to imitation and sustainability of competitive advantage. In the last part the major issues of previous theoretical discussions and debates have been derived. Competency, competitive advantage and causal ambiguity: Competency Pattern of skill and resource deployment that help the firm to achieve its goals. Two main themes of competency: a) The source of competency is always internal to the firm b) Competency is produced by a firm it utilizes its internal skills and resources, relative to the competition. Competitive advantage: The unique position an organization develops vis--vis its competitors through its patterns of resource deploy. It is also viewed that the competitive advantage is something that is being used by the firms within their strategies.

Competencies and competitive advantage are independent variables and performance is the dependant variable. Competitive advantage can be derived from different sources like competencies because competencies are something which is within the firms strategies. Causal ambiguity: Basic ambiguity concerning the nature of the causal connections between actions and results. It may be so great that the managers in the firms do not understand the relation between action and outcomes. Simultaneous sources of advantage and ambiguity: Three characteristics of competency are the sources of advantage and ambiguity. Tacitness: Skill based competence include tacit knowledge Such competencies are accumulated by experiences. There is little tacitness in the production process. At one extreme imitation will be feasible by reverse engineering a product that contains little more than an unusual standardized technological elements. And on the other hand sometimes the target routine may involve so much affected tacit knowledge that even successful replication may be problematic and itlet alone imitation from a distance. Clearly between two extremes tacitness is a source between the rivals and it creates barriers between the imitation. Complexity: Complexity arises from the interrelationship between skills, and between skills and assets. Product complexity arises from the necessary combination of skills from numerous departments cause difficulty in imitation. Specificity: The outcomes of the business actions which are the result of combinations of skills and resource deployment are highly interdependent between the transaction partners.

Because of these relationships the skill and resource deployment remains ambiguous and through their specificity such competencies raise barriers to ambiguities. Relationship with ambiguities: In order to define relationship with ambiguity it was described that it has some degrees.Also there exist some degrees of tacitness, complexity and specificity. Logically high degrees of tacitness, complexity or specificity produce high degrees of ambiguity. Tacitness, complexity and specificity are the characteristics of competency thats why independent variables, ambiguity is dependant variables. Relationship between and ambiguity is linear. Tacitness directly promotes ambiguity. Relationship between ambiguity and complexity is curvilinear. As we know that complexity arises due to the patters of skill and resource deployment, then ambiguity will increase geometrically as skill and resource ambiguity will increase arithmetically Relationship of specificity with ambiguity is multifunctional. Because ambiguity may be derived from skill and resource specificity. Barriers to imitation: Interaction effects of tacitness, complexity and specificity serve to highten ambiguity effects and barriers to intimation. When we talk about the derivation of relationship between ambiguity, competency and and barriers of imitation then we will conclude that the barrier height is the function of level of competition.a given amount of ambiguity in highly competitive environment results in a low barrier than the ambiguity in the less competitive environment. We also propose that in low value added firms the maximum potential for ambiguity is less than that of high value added firms. Barriers to imitation are dependent upon the firms competency based advantage. Decay and sustainability of advantage: Decay: Without taking in account degree of ambiguity decay remains the temporarily related phenomenon in the barriers to imitation. Level of decay is proportional to the level of ambiguity for the given level of competition and for the given level of ambiguity the rate of decay is proportional to the amount of competition. Reinvestment: Through reinvestment the barriers can be maintained and advantages can be sustained. Reinvestment in ambiguity should be aimed at the competencies on which advantage is based and

ambiguity is derived. Sustainability of competency based competitive advantage is dependant upon reinvestment in causal ambiguous competency characteristics.

Research implications. Theory tells us that sustained that sustained competitive advantage leads to consistently improved performance.If the initial stage of the research program confirms an association between causally ambiguous competencies and sustained performance, the second stage should then seek to investigate the specifics of the relationship by using the propositions listed here. The first step to these ends is the measurement and operationalization of the constructs. Tacitness cause the measurement problem because it remain measurement problem. Measurement of complexity may be derived from primary source observations of the numbers of skill and resource interactions. A basis for measurement for specificity may be fixed, variable, and contracting costs. Ambiguity arisen from these characteristics remains unidimentional so they need simplification. So in order to simplify them address them as a ratio variable. Economics provides a great variety of literature through which measurement of competition can be achieved. these includes R&D, advertising intensity etc. Competition may be more properly measured at the strategic group level. Decay rates are also unidimensional. Conversely, reinvestment is multidimensional.

Conclusion: Ambiguity in business outcomes creates a barrier in competitive imitation. The height of barrier is determined by the degree of aggressiveness of competition and degree of ambiguity.reinvestment is the sour of ambiguity and is requird. The amount of reinvestment depend upon the height of barrier, the rate of decay which is caused by competition, and the potential pay off. the above discussion shows that the strategy is a function of continous competitive interaction. Sustained competitive advantage is emerged from a continual competency accumulation which generates both causal ambiguity and barrier to imitation that permits sustainibilty of advantage over rivals.