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.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title
page
Certification
Dedication
Acknowledgement
Abstract
Table
of contents
CHAPTER
ONE
- Background of the study
- Statement of problem
- Objectives of the study
- Research questions
- Hypotheses formulation
- Significance of the study
- Scope of the study
- Limitations of the study
- Definition of terms
References
CHAPTER
TWO
2.0
Review of related literature
2.1
The concept of strategy
2.2
Strategy as content and process
2.3
Strategy as practice: An activity Based view of strategy
2.3.1
Strategizing all over the organization
2.4
strategic goals and components
2.4.1
Individual collective and organization goals
2.4.2
Strategic intent and goal
2.5
Adoption of strategic goals
2.6
Organization strategic activities
2.7
The Essence of strategic action
2.8
Strategic activities, Types and classification
2.8.1
Strategic activity classification
2.9
Bourdex Telecom’s strategic goal
2.9.1
Development project related activities
2.9.2
Desired activities for customer service
Process
improvement
Reference
CHAPTER
THREE
3.0
Research methodology
3.1
Research design
3.2
Area of the study
3.3
Population of study
3.4
Sample size determination
3.5
Instrument of Data Collection
3.6
Method of Data presentation and analysis
References
CHAPTER
FOUR
4.1
Presentation and Analysis of Data
4.2
Hypotheses test
CHAPTER
FIVE
5.0
Summary of findings, recommendation and conclusion
5.1
Summary of findings,
5.2
recommendations
5.3
Conclusion
Bibliography
CHAPTER
ONE
INTRODUCTION
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.
STATEMENT OR PROBLEM
ADOPTION OF STRATEGY GOALS: EXPLORING THE SUCCESS OF STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION THROUGH ORGANIZATIONAL ACTIVITIES (A STUDY OF BOURDEX TELECOM MANAGEMENT SERVICES)
