Explaining the Strategic Groups–Firm Performance Relationship: A Multilevel Approach Applied to Small and Medium‐Sized Hotel Companies in Spain*

One of the main research questions in the field of strategic management is why firms obtain different performance levels. This paper answers this question from the strategic groups approach. This paper analyzes the linkage between strategic groups and firm performance offering a multilevel analysis about the relative importance of intergroup and intragroup performance differences based on the use of hierarchical linear models. The results show that intragroup differences explain firm performance better than intergroup differences.