Category: MBA Projects

Strategic Management 

According to Shrivasthava, strategy is sustained as an ideology because the five criteria that can identify an ideology are satisfied by his strategy. By referring to published work on strategic management it is clear that in an organization “what the management feels good will be good for all the others”. It is also evident from previous studies that the contestability is not only rejected for the industry but is also rejected for the market and the company. Actually the ideals of productivity and efficiency stay challenging and unsupported and so the “normative idealization of goals” is questioned in the stakeholder research that has started recently. The industry and environment status quo is left because of the cultural and social factors of the individual activities.                                     

On the  other side, of Srivathsava’s view is that different ideologies deal with the   thriving of stakeholders as well as the notion of praxis. His policy look over the praxis is differentiated  from that of Porter’s five force frame work  which identify different parameters  to increase the profits of a company. Since the line which Porter is very thin which are successful and applicable for only senior manager. Knights argue that imperialism is a one kind of strategy which wraps the managerial authority which is widely suitable for the  cultural science of independence.  Knights clarifies that it is difficult to follow Porter  but still  the generic strategies  ratified  address the financial sector  for  many senior level managers.

To make generic strategies work, managers should apply ‘reality checks’ which can be done by ‘forgetting, neglecting or denying the subjectivity’. Though the Porter’s agenda is difficult to implement for each and every business, still every one  follows it because the idea of  ‘unequal power’ extracted from ‘specialist knowledge’ is  backed by senior level managers throughout the world. Knights clarifies porters philosophy, praises it for its management accuracy that this gives ‘some illusion of control, legitimacy and security in the face of uncertainty’. Though Beeby argues this is a parable, still, this ideology is considered to be ‘strategic management’.

The long term or short term goals of the organization are accomplished by developing an effective strategy. “The success of any strategy begins with skilful recruitment and human resources policies and work through internal debate and effective communication.”.  The strategy is analyzed through the means of planning to gain ability and core competencies in order to attain the organizational goals. Sharing the strategy among the employees of the organisation in a effective manner is the key to success. When the employees know about the strategy, they work in tune with the strategy and this leads to a progressive effect on the front line managers.

As mentioned in the Lewis Carol’s poem, if employees are unclear about the motives behind the company’s strategy, they don’t synchronize their efforts in tune with the company’s goals to make it a success. The strategy should be interpreted by the employees and effectively digested by the employees. When the employees are clear about their path ahead, they tend to be more confident and contend. . Strategy is defined as “plans, programme’s and intentions to develop the human capability of an organization to meet its future needs of its external and internal environment”

One of the key factors of the organizational success is the efficient divulgement of the strategy to the work force in action. The CEOs of large business organizations generally employ divergent strategies to enhance company performance for the very same firm. The studies in the early 70’s suggest that CEO’s tend to be more inclined the issue of how the strategy is framed rather than how the strategy is implemented. Research identifies that enterprises with strategy clearly defined and explained to the employees reflect better performance than those enterprises where the motives of the strategy are made unclear to the employees. All the functional departments like finance, operations, human resources and marketing are integrated in tune with the strategy.

The strategy implementation is performed and made available to employees in various ways and means of achieving it should be clearly disposed to the employees. In the business scenario, strategies enable to view at the future prospects of the organisation in terms of its products, services and potential markets. So, far very little is been researched on implementing and measuring the strategy of the company. The way in which how different operational functions of the organisations interpret it and communicate it reflects the might and well-being of an enterprise.

Strategy implementation 

“Strategic implementation is regarded as a form of organizational learning wherein the threats and opportunities are studied to come up with new strategies in response to such threats and opportunities. This makes the organization to finetune its strategies according to the environmental factors which is a constant learning process.”.  It is inferred from the above discussion that strategy implementation is a tough task for management as it is an art of making people to do the work in line with the strategy. So, only strategy implementation is regarded as a sort of expertise.

The various prototype factors in the course of strategy implementation are generally soft, hard and mixed. These depend on the level of communication with the people around in the organisation. Strategic implementation is largely influenced by the mechanism employed for co-ordination. Strategy execution implies a step by step approach to implementing certain activities that lead to a formulated and structured decision making. It is regarded as a cognitive process.

The key to success lies in the effective mapping of the necessary outcomes with performance measures. The general trait of successful leaders is that they share their vision among the team members in the form of simple stories about their visionary and the hallmark of the success is attributed to the celebration of their achievements or milestones whether big or small.

To see that the strategy is shared, the team should openly voice their opinions about the strategy, confront premises, and challenge the theory and propose alternatives without fear of being scolded. The successful strategic implementation call for leaders who can inspire and mould through coaching rather than command and control. Recognizing success and granting appraisals based on their performance, inspiring and motivating them lead to better results in inducing better commitment rather than by using force and authority which contribute to cold rebellion and inactive resistance.

In tune with this discussion, strategic planning is interpreted as primarily an analytical process that aims at the selection of long-term goals and objectives that appropriately enables to design a sophisticated organization structure. A notion is that desired outcomes could be achieved by focusing on both internal and external factors and analysing them by the means of professional management to implement strategic actions. Effective planning can minimize the consequences of uncertainty.

The possibility is not encouraged that : leaders or planners do tend to overlook the new potential opportunities attributing to their previous history, their ability or experience; that design of novel proposals might be disrupted due to the political factors prevailing in the corporate culture, transient market conditions; that planning overlooked the lower hierarchical  knowledge and expertise to consider only the top hierarchy decisions; that planning entertained strict adherence to the plan, giving less room for flexibility and learning . Nevertheless, as outcomes deviated from the desired intentions, as strategies could not succeed in delivering the desired results pertaining to the organizational motives and as plans often remained futile without serving any purpose just to remain unused on the top shelf, people started to refine the planning model.

Steadily, the recognition emerged that formal planning contributed least in the successful results and effective strategic decisions and the belief of synchronizing the internal factors of the enterprise to the external environmental conditions is deemed to be too shallow . It is not successful in realizing how internal organization operations and sub cultures were loosely bonded, how divergence, chaos and dissimilarities lead to novelty in innovation and rediscovery, and how persistent response to the swift changes provokes instability, unfair outcomes and failure to remain core competent. Three primary ideas dawned to form thinking on what is required to overcome these loopholes in how the strategy process was framed.

The first postulated Michael Porter’s proposal that business strategy should give rise to greater performance, competitive positioning, sustainable competitive edge, and commitment to a determined path. The second from Henry Mintzberg who stated that the strategic outcome is a lot influenced by the organizational design and structure, political and cultural environment or the gradual strategic formation based on the managers’ reaction to the external pressures pertaining to the external competitive surroundings. The third proposal comes from Hamel and Prahalad who viewed core competencies and potentialities as the prime factor for competitive edge.

Chaffe proposes that strategy is multi-faceted and dependant on the situation. Nevertheless, he says that it suffers from three conflicting aspects of strategy. The first model is the linear strategy model which is largely centered on forecasting and development and the second one is the adaptive strategy where the managers’ prime focus is on the means and the third one is the interpretive strategy where the procedure of research goes on the lines of the qualitative opinions of the people that reflect reality.

Conventionally, a strategy is implemented by the top level management and is passed through the next successive levels of management . For instance, in the case of successful coaches and top directors where the rules are set to be followed by the players or employees at the right time. The functioning of the strategy closely resembles the relay team which comprises of four legs and the baton is passed from the first leg to the fourth leg. Likewise, management is composed of four management hierarchies namely the senior management, middle level management, the low level management and the non-management level .

The strategy is framed by the senior level management and the middle level management and is made to be followed by the low level management and non-management like how the baton is passed in a relay from the first person to the fourth person. If the senior or middle level management is not clear in implementing or communicating the strategy, it leads to confusion and chaos. Moreover, when the involvement of senior management is too low in implementing the strategy, it takes a lot of time to reach the non-management level which leads to the failure in strategy.

Strategic Communication

Figure 2.1: Five tasks of strategic communication and implementation 

It is recommended that the strategic communication and implementation process is based on the identification of the environmental problems of the organization internally and externally and the evaluation of strengths and weaknesses. This important step in the strategic process is “Analysis and Diagnosis”. This step deals with assessing the existing environmental problems in the strategy and providing alternative solutions to the problem. As the problems are analyzed in this step, a new structure is developed to support the strategy and accordingly the policies and measures are framed.

The understanding of the organizational environment by analyzing it is a key step in the strategic communication and implementation process. This provides for the assessment of the prevailing situation faced by the organization. Accordingly the strategy is developed by understanding the current situation of the organization and it facilitates the  identification of the potential opportunities and threats.

This article reviews the definition of strategy in the opinion of various authors. Different organizational strategies and the corresponding types of the strategies are also reviewed with reference to various research papers done and the actual review is as given in the later sections. 

Definition of strategy 

The word strategy comes from the Greek word ‘stratos’ which is a that is generally used by army as a sort of future planning process to attain success by the top level. This word is natively concerned with military forces as the process of planning, coordinating and directing military operations at the time of war. The word strategy has largely come into existence when the organizations began to use this word.

This happened post the second world war when the army heads of both the sides of Atlantic were called to assess the business process with their knowledge of the successful tactical fundamentals that were used in the wars. The concept of  strategy as it was understood in early days in the 1960s is: “The establishment of set goals and objectives of an organization and the implementation of certain courses of action along with the allocation of required resources for attaining these goals”.

 “Business strategies guide people in the organization by setting up certain frame work of informal rules to follow in order to perform the work. They are said to be a set of actions that the group of people in the enterprise exhibit. They are effective because they give a distinctive form and structure to the organization even they employ the same procedures, rules, technologies and guidelines”.

The disposal of strategic terms to the team in the organization and implementing it is a part of the formalized strategic planning system making use of the resources and the environment. Strategic communication is a term that is defined in different dimensions by various researchers but the prime focus of the process is to establish an enterprise to hold a strong market position and to make the organization capable of withstanding the consequences of unprecedented events, internal problems and strong competition.

Aims and Objectives

Aim: To investigate the role of organizational strategies in improving the performance and job satisfaction of employees within AMT COFFEE LTD. 

Objectives

Following are the research objectives

1. To critically review the organizational strategies and the corresponding theories
2. To evaluate the importance of organizational strategies against the employee performance and job satisfaction
3. To investigate the role of managers in communicating strategies to their employees and enhance their performance. 

Dissertation outline

Introduction to the research and the problem definition with the research questions, aims and objective are given in the chapter below. 

Literature Review

A detailed review of strategic management and organizational strategies is presented in this chapter with reference to the employee performance and job satisfaction 

Research methodology

The actual methodology followed to gather the required primary information and secondary information along with the case study details and sampling methods is explained in this chapter 

Research findings

Once the required primary information is gathered in the form of semi structured interviews from different respondents involved across the research, the actual findings are given in this chapter. 

Research Analysis

Required research analysis is done based on the research findings and the analysis is given the form of answers to the research questions identified in the introduction chapter. 

Conclusion and Future work

Overall analysis and observations done at the research is given in the conclusion and the future scope to improve the research quality is also given in this chapter.

Below are the approaches to the strategic management process:

Process 1:

                   This approach of the strategic management process is generally carried out in five steps and the management can make the employee understand the strategy by following these five steps and they are: firstly, employees need to think strategically and they also need to have conceptual tools. Secondly, the strategies must be understood by the employees. The third step is to build the strategic alignment across the organizational structure as a major requirement. Fourth, reflection of the strategy implemented should be done on the structure of every employee work particularly on the employees of critical regions. The fifth one is that the organization must be buy- in to the strategy.

Process 2:

                        This process includes five tasks and they are: as a first task, Business Mission and Strategic Vision should be developed and then the objectives should be set up as the second task. The third task is to achieve the objectives by crafting the strategies and then these strategies should be implemented and then executed as the fourth task. The fifth task will be completed by performing various activities like reviewing the fresh developments, estimating and determining the performances and originating the counteractive adjustments.

                               This indicates that various activities like identification of internal weakness and strengths, problems of the environment and its opportunities are involved in the strategic management. This step is called “Analysis or Diagnosis” or simply called as “SWOT analysis”. And the further steps are carried based on the selection, implementation and estimation. Creating a solution as an alternative one for the problem is the aim of these steps, and the other aim is establishing an organizational structure to make the strategy work for giving support for the strategy, to develop the required policies and plans, determining the working status of the strategy by gathering the feedbacks and then implementing steps to start the working of the strategy.

                                The strategic management has another significant stage and that is analysing the environment, this stage focuses on making the employees understand about the situation faced by the organization in the current condition. The organization activities are influence by various factors that are caused internally and externally and this impact can be estimated by analysing the environment. The analysis of environment can discover the strong problems and chances for the organizations and further this can also support in the strategy development in an organization. Significantly two environments are analysed in this stage of strategic management process and they are external environment and internal environment.

The external environment is included with two environments that are general environment and immediate environment. The general environment covers the outside area of the organization like Political, Economic, Social and Technological. The immediate environments are the area where there will be a lot of competition for the organization that may damages the company growth. The internal environment includes the internal analysis and Vision and Mission statements.

The internal analysis deals with the analysis of internal area of the organization and Vision and Mission Statements will analyse the actual purpose of the organization. By monitoring these tasks the management can generate clear strategies for the organization and can communicate these strategies for the employees to make them perfectly work for the organization with experiencing a good job satisfaction.

Generally the attitudes of the employees vary from person to person.  The common attitude of an employee is never to bother too much about the business strategy. Employees commonly focus on their work. But the performance of the employee will be developed a lot when he is aware of the strategy that is implemented in the organization. The employee can perfectly understand the strategy when it is properly communicated to them.  

So organizations must focus on the process of communicating strategies to the employees.  The management initially analyses the drawbacks that are to be avoided and then they will focus on the communication process of these strategies for the employees of various divisions in the organization. The main aim of this research is to identify the role of managers in communicating the organizational strategies to the employees and in doing so improving employee performance.  The  following questions are identified in order to research this issue.

The process of using human, financial and technical resources for achieving organizational goals while considering a variety of environmental variables is called Strategic Management. In addition to this, the process of sharing the strategy, staff, styles, structure, skills, succession, systems, goals and values is another facet of  Strategic Management. According to research it is evident that the top level of a firm focuses more on the strategic management. Renovating the organizational goals into real life contexts is the significant issue faced by many organizations in planning the strategic management. The organization cannot be maintained if it does not have proper strategy, as a result the position of the organization and its future statues is not known to the management.

So a strategy is necessary for all organizations irrespective of their size, small or large. A strategy can build a path for the success of the organization by using the known motives and directions. The organization gets developed using a structure in order to estimate its position in the business market. The manager of the organization should be responsible for the development of the organization and so he should be assure that the organizational roots or origins are reached by all the strategies of the organization especially for satisfying the goals of an organization. The process of developing a strategy involves few individuals commonly managers and this process is called “Strategic Alignment”.  

Understanding these strategies is necessary for employees because if the better the strategies are known, the better the performance. The organization must be careful in developing a clear strategy because if the strategy is clear for the employees then they can understand it clearly and as a result the aim of the organization will be clear for them and then they can work for the organization in such a way that they can satisfy the desired aims and goals of the organizations. If in case the organization fails to have a clear strategy then they will also fail in satisfying their required aims and goals.

That means the success of an organization is purely based on the strategy it is having. The implementation of the strategy also plays a major role in achieving the desired goals. Hence it is proved that a clear strategy can be created clearly by the top level management of the organization or middle order managers. It is also evident that understanding of the strategy by the employees is essential for the development of the organization and without such an understanding the organization cannot even move a single step towards achieving its goals.

                                        According to various researchers there are different approaches to strategic management. An organization uses a strategic management process in any of the approach but with a common aim to achieve success for the organization by handling situations like internal problems in the organizations, heavy competition and also when unexpected situations threaten the company’s position in the competitive business market.

Questioner to Area managers

1. What are your recent distribution strategies implemented across your area?

2. Do you set any targets to your employees in terms of distribution and sales?

3. How do you communicate the distribution strategies to your employees?

4. How do you observe that the strategies are well communicated to the employees?

5. Do you involve your employees in a typical strategy development process?

6. What level of interest is shown by the employees if they are involved in strategy development process?

7. Do you think involving the employees across the strategy development process really enhance their job performance and satisfaction?

8. How do measure the level of understanding of the employees towards the distribution strategies?

9. Do you conduct any review meetings with the employees towards the strategy implementation?

10. Do you think communicating the strategies to the employees really improve their performance and job satisfaction?

11. Have you observed any improvement of the employee performance after introducing and implementation of a distribution strategy?

12. How do you measure the performance of the employees against the strategy implementation?

13. Do your employees come up with any issues regarding their job satisfaction if they are not really aware of the strategies?

14. What steps you generally take to make sure all of your employees aware of the recent strategies developed?

15. What future steps can be taken to make this process more effective?