ABSTRACT
This study is about the success of strategy implementation. Implementation, the conceptual counterpart of strategy formulation, has been regarded as an extremely challenging area in management practice. Still, strategy implementation has received remarkably less attention in the strategic management literature. The existing implementation frameworks are mostly normative and rather limited.
On the other hand, the strategy as practice research agenda has emerged to study strategy on the micro level, as a social phenomenon. Practice researchers have introduced an activity – based view on strategy that is concerned with the day – to – day activities of organizational life that relate to strategic outcomes. Still, there is a clear need to know more about these strategic activities: what are they like, and how are they related to strategic outcomes.
This study explores the success of strategy implementation in terms of organizational activities, by focusing on two questions: how are the strategy goals realized through organic goal’s adoption? The research questions are addressed empirically.
The analysis produces a general strategic activity categorization consisting of numerous activities under five main activity categories of determining, communicating, controlling, organization and interacting with the environment. The activities divide into existing and desired
ones, which further divide into enhancing and novel one, the analysis reveals that successful adoption of a strategic goal is desired activities that enhance the existing ones and extensive repertories of novel desired activities in addition, the scope of the strategic goals’ origin and its coherence with other elements of strategy is proposed to contribute to the adoption of the strategic goal.
The study contributed to the strategy as practice discussion by taking the activity – based view seriously and showing in detail what the strategic activities are like and how they are linked to the success of strategy implementation. The research reveals that strategy implementation is a much more complicated, creative, communicative, and external oriented phenomenon than the extant literature presents. Furthermore this study adds to the very limited empirical research on how strategies are adopted and enacted on all organizational levels. The practical implications of the study concern critical evaluation of existing and desired activity patterns, as well as understanding the significance of the strategic goals’ origin and the coherence of the strategic whole.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
Although strategy has been one of the main interests of both organization theorists and practitioners for decades.
Porter (1991:95-117) states that the most central question in strategy research has been why some firms succeed and some fail. According to Tsoukas (1996:11-25) in studying firms’ behaviour, management researchers have traditionally addressed two questions in what direction should a firm channel its activities and how should a firm be organized.
On the other hand, business management and practitioners in private and public organizations as well as strategy consultants, strategy gurus, and business schools have constantly sought models and guidelines to ensure organizational survival and success as the basic motivation for all strategists. Strategy is about understanding and anticipating the nature of an organization’s competitive environment and its position within it. Barney (1991:99-120) states that a strategy is about understanding the organization’s valuable, rare, inimitable and non-substitable internal resources, and core competences.. Ansoff (1965) views strategy as about creating ingenious plans for the future to beat competitors to
serve customers in novels ways, but it is also about organizational action, taking different kinds of actions step-by-step in specific way.
Though, this research project is about the success of strategy implementation. The processes by which strategies are created, that is, strategy formulation, or strategy making, have gained growing attention since the 1960s and the early authors have developed different normative frameworks and models for building a successful corporate or business strategy. As a conceptual counterpart to formulation, strategy implementation has been considered a process of executing the decisions made in the formulation process.
Hrebiniak and Joyce (2001:602) stress that strategy implementation has not reached as much attention as formulation and has even been labeled as “a neglected area in the literature of strategic management. Therefore, formulation and implementation f strategy have generally been considered as separate, distinguishable parts of the strategic management process and the conceptual separation of implementation and formulation can also be seen strategy write up or textbooks.
Snow and Harmbrick (1980:527:538)” even argue that, researchers have ( …) reached a general consensus on distinguishing between strategy formulation and strategy implementation. The advantage of making this distinction is that the cognitive aspects of strategy formulation, can be viewed as an important phases apart from
the action component (implementation) But this work look at this distinction as myopic considering thinking and doing. The believe here demonstrate that, implementation is more than pure mechanical execution, requiring cognition, initiative and interaction on the part of various stakeholders throughout the organization.
Infact, the classical implementation literature is often laden with a rather mechanistic idea of man, which neglects the factor that organizational members are conscious agents with their own intents and is manifested in terms such as “installing strategy” As Clegg et al (2004: 24) put it, the Cartesian split between the intelligible mind and the dumb body that has to be informed”.
Some groups of authors like, “Bourgeois and Brodwin (1984) Noble (1999) and Hrebiniak and Joyce (2001 states that the concept of strategy implementation is “elusive” and strategy implementation research is “eclectic” being fragmented among several fields of organization and management study.
Thus, normative strategy literature is packed with models of successful strategy implementation, suggesting a strategy to be implemented through activities such as objectives, incentives, controls and structures. Alexander (1991: 73-96) and Beer Eisenstat (2000:29-40) focused on the problems in implementation and have identified a number of difficulties, (weak management roles in implementation, lack of
communication, lack of commitment to the strategy, unawareness or misunderstanding of the strategy, unaligned organizational systems and resources, poor coordination and sharing of responsibilities, inadequate capabilities, and competing activities).
The majority of strategy implementation literature is normative, suggesting that strategy is implemented in a certain way. Even though it is noted that the type of strategy may potentially influences the implementation action, the context is often ignored, proposing that all kinds of organizations, in all kinds of situations and with any kind of strategic goals, should know the same model of implementation .
In other words, strategy implementation literature remains rather superficial and does not describe how particular strategies are realized. Whittington (1996. 731-735) recently emerged a strategy research stream that aims to look into the black box of organization to study strategy on the micro level. This strategy as practice research agenda explores strategy as a social phenomenon, by investigating how the practitioners of strategy really act and interact. It calls of ran “activity- based view on strategy and proposes that value lies increasingly in the micro activities of managers and others in organizations and seeks to understand organization’s strategies and processes, and seeks to understand organization’s strategies and processes, and what is actually done there and by whom.
Obviously, there are both theoretical and practical needs to understand strategy implementation better and there is a growing ambition to study strategy as an intra-organizational, micro level phenomenon. It is my believe that in order to tackle the numerous observed problems of implementation, we should create better more elucidatory, conceptualizations of strategy implementation, and to be able to concretize what we want to explore, what really happens in the name of strategy in organizations.
1.2 STATEMENT OR PROBLEM
As discussed above, this project focuses on what organizations actually do in their strategizing efforts. Most specifically, its dealt with what kinds of activities organizations realize their strategies and which characteristics in these activities are related to successful strategy implementation. A particularly interest here is in seeking to reveal how strategy comes alive in all organizational levels, in the actions and activities of all organizational members, not only those of top management. By so doing, there is need to shed a little light on the roots of the various strategy implementation challenges.
Based on the above discussion, the general research problem for the study is defined as “ How do day to day organizational activities reflect
the success of strategy implementation and what machineries do organizations lack in the adoption to the strategy goals.
This research problem will be operationalized into a set of research questions.
1.3 OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY
This study has the following objectives as a target
(1) To determine the main nature of strategy and its adoption in organization
(2) To ascertain the linkage between the variety of ongoing organizational activities and the strategy of organization
(3) To identify the practical challenges of implementing strategies
(4) To suggest then certain measures to operationalize linkage between mundane organizational activities and the official strategy expressions in organizations.
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
As the aims of this study is to describe strategy implementation in a novel and detailed way by exploring the repertoire of strategic activities and their relationships with strategic goals. The following are the operationalized questions.
a. How are strategic goal realized through organizational activities?
b. What kinds of strategic activities are there in organization?
c. How do different strategic goals manifest themselves in the activities?
d. How are strategic activities related to the success of strategic goal’s adoption?
e. How are the strategic goals being adopted?
f. What characteristics of the strategic activities reflect the adoption of the strategic goal?
1:5 HYPOTHESES FORMULATION
The hypotheses of this study are as follows:-
Ho: There is no distinctive nature of strategy adoption in organization
Hi: There is distinctive nature of strategy adoption in organization
Ho: There is no linkage between the variety of on going organizational activities and the strategy of organization
H2:- There is linkage between the variety of ongoing organizational activities and the strategy of organization
H0: There is no practical challenges of implement strategies in organization
H3: There is practical challenges of implementing strategies in organization
1.6 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY
This work will of benefits to numerous private organization, individual, public organization, government and other works of like.
Firstly, private and public organizations through this work will gain more insight from what strategy entail, its impediments, reasons why strategies and activities are not inline which may lead to unoperationalized and unconnected to the daily work and routines of organizations.
Generally, organizational strategies and strategic goals, as well as their implementation are relatively interchangeable and were ought to be monitored or control in every organizational changes. In study, the harmonic use and practicability of the concept will enable growth of organization and successful implementation.
1.7 SCOPE OF THE STUDY
The scope of this study covers the three local government area that constitutes the Enugu Metropolis and the Bourdex Telecom Service Providers within the urban centres. The areas are, Enugu North, Enugu
South and Enugu East Local Government Area in which Users and
Telecom centre established their locale.
1.8 LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
Perhaps, the research work should have covered the entire Enugu State where the domain of Bourdex Telecom situates, but owing to the circumstances of both time and resources ( financial incapacitation) the study then was limited to Enugu Metropolis.
Again, judging to the economic situation in Nigeria the researcher was incapacitated financially that it cannot allow him reach this whole required areas, material and source. Also, it is well known that time is nobody’s friend, therefore time is a constraint to the researcher.
1.9 DEFINITION OF TERMS
The following concepts was defined viz.
1) STRATEGY
Is the determination of the basic long-term goals and objectives of an enterprise, and the adoption of the courses of action and the allocation of resources necessary for carrying out these goals. (Whittington 1996: 731-735)
2) STRATEGIC INTENT/GOAL
As those long-term goals that reflect the preferred future position of the firm, as articulated by its management (Porter 1991: 95-117)
3) TO ADOPT
To choose or take as one’s own, make one’s own by selection or assent, to accept or act in accordance with (a plan, principle etc) to take over (an idea etc) from another person, to chose to follow or a course of action etc (Tsoukas 1996: 11-25)
4. ACTIVITY
The state or quality of being active, or a situation in which something is happening or a lot of things are being done (Snow and Hambrick
1980: 527-538)
5. STRATEGIC IMPLEMENTATION Is the act of operationalizing the task, goals and activities in order to achieve the strategic objective of an organizations
This material content is developed to serve as a GUIDE for students to conduct academic research
ADOPTION OF STRATEGY GOALS EXPLORING THE SUCCESS OF STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION THROUGH ORGANIZATIONAL ACTIVITIES (A STUDY OF BOURDEX TELECOM MANAGEMENT SERVICES)
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