An Exploratory Study of the Determinants of the Quality of Strategic Decision Implementation in Turkish Industrial Firms

Abstract

This paper investigates the determinants of quality of decision implementation. By drawing on a sample of 116 firms located in Turkey, we test whether the features of important team processes (i.e., trust and participation), of the organization (i.e. past performance) and of implementation (i.e., its speed and uncertainty) exert an influence on the quality with which decisions are implemented. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to test the validity of the measures, while path analysis was used in hypotheses testing. The results suggest that quality of decision implementation is positively related to trust, participation and past performance, and negatively to implementation speed and uncertainty. The implications of these findings for theory, practice and general management are discussed.

Strategic Planning and Implementation Success in Public Service Organizations: Evidence from Canada

“…Several studies of private sector organizations suggest that strategic planning can be enhanced by encouraging managerial participation in the process. Elbanna, Thanos, and Colak (2014), Nutt (1999) and Wooldridge and Floyd (1990), in particular, find that such participation results in improved implementation. And, there is good prima facie reason for thinking that such participation will also matter in the public sector, where middle managers, especially, play an increasingly important role in strategy implementation (Gatenby et al, forthcoming;Ridder, Bruns, and Spier 2006).…”

“…Hence, on the basis of reviewing related research (e.g. Elbanna, Thanos, and Colak 2014;Ford, Sharfman, and Dean 2008;Miller 1997) and our concept of implementation success, that showed 'how well a strategic plan has been implemented', we adapted our measure of strategy implementation success for the purpose of this study. • It is very difficult to get approval for a project that is worth doing.…”

“…The successful implementation of strategic decisions is widely thought to be critical to the achievement of organizational aims and objectives (Elbanna, Thanos, and Colak 2014;Schweiger and Sandberg 1991). This applies as much to public sector organizations as to those in the private sector.…”

“…Nevertheless, in spite of the widespread recognition of the critical role that strategy implementation success plays in determining organizational achievements amongst public management theorists (Bryson 2010;Poister 2010), there remain few studies that actually examine the antecedents of successful strategy implementation in public service organizations (for reviews of the state-of-the-art, see Bryson, Berry, and Yang 2010;Poister, Pitts, and Edwards 2010). In fact, the literature on strategy implementation generally remains fragmented and dispersed throughout the general and specialized management literatures, with little systematic investigation of any of the major themes relating to the implementation success (Bossidy and Charan 2011;Elbanna, Thanos, and Colak 2014;Noble 1999). In this article, we seek to cast light on a critical issue running through scholarly debates about strategic management in the public sector and the implementation of key decisions: the role that formal strategic planning can play in determining strategy implementation success.…”

“…Moreover, little attention has been devoted to the boundary conditions of the relationship between formal strategic planning and strategy implementation success. In particular, the active participation of managers in strategic planning is typically regarded as an essential process for making strategic decisions work (Elbanna, Thanos, and Colak 2014;Floyd and Wooldridge 1994), and as such managerial involvement in planning is likely to mediate the connection between strategy formulation and implementation success (Collier, Fishwick, and Floyd 2004;Floyd and Wooldridge 1997).…”