The harder firms practice strategic management, the better they are

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2365
• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Bakheet Al Katheeri,Mustafa Colak,Said Elbanna

RESEARCH ARTICLE

The harder firms practice strategic management, the better

they are

Said Elbanna

1

| Bakheet Al Katheeri

2

| Mustafa Colak

3

1

Department of Management and Marketing,

College of Business and Economics, Qatar

University, Doha, Qatar

2

Mubadala Petroleum, Abu Dhabi, United Arab

Emirates

3

Department of Business Administration,

Faculty of Political Sciences, Social Sciences

University of Ankara (ASBU), Ankara, Turkey

Correspondence

Said Elbanna, Department of Management and

Marketing, College of Business and Economics,

Qatar University, Doha, QATAR P.O. Box:

2713 Doha, Qatar

Email: selbanna@qu.edu.qa

Abstract

The integrated practice of strategic management, that is the use of the three compo-

nents of the strategic management process (formulation, implementation, and evalua-

tion) does matter. Firms should plan intensively and pay attention to choosing

strategic planning tools that best fit their needs. No matter how sound the formu-

lated plans are, firms will not benefit if these plans are neither implemented nor eval-

uated correctly. The harder firms practice strategic management, the better their

performance and competitiveness will be.

KEYWORDS

firm competitiveness, semi-government firms, strategic planning, strategy evaluation and

control, strategy formulation, strategy implementation

1|INTRODUCTION

The last few decades have seen phenomenal transformations in the

way that organizations work. These transformations have paved the

way for new work practices and technologies, enabling businesses to

cope with changing economic and social consequences in an increas-

ingly global marketplace (Mulcaster, 2008). In order to tackle the new

economic and social conditions, organizations are practicing strategic

management to achieve high levels of alignment and performance

(Mckeown, 2012). As businesses evolved, strategic management was

introduced to increase management's ability to develop plans, policies,

and structures (Neilson, Martin, & Powers, 2008). It allowed organiza-

tions to assess and re-assess strategies, competitors, new economic

situations, and technology. Through strategic management, organiza-

tions learned to make timely business decisions and deal with an

increasingly uncertain future. Although the amount of research on this

area is vast, several notable gaps indeed remain in the literature, in

particular, an examination of integrative models of the strategic

management process, along with lack of research in developing coun-

tries and the semi government sector, and finally a less research on

both strategy implementation and evaluation. This study aims to con-

tribute to the above four research gaps as briefly addressed below.

First, although there are plenty of empirical studies on any of the

three elements of the strategic management process (namely, formu-

lation, implementation, and control), it is hard to find one study that

incorporates all three elements in a single work as the present

research does. This is a significant contribution of this study, which

contributes to filling a severe gap in the literature of strategic manage-

ment. Second, organizations can be classified as pure government,

quasi- or semi-government, and purely private organizations. This

study targets quasi- or semi-government organizations, which may

not be easy to define them (Moe, 2001) precisely. For our study, the

quasi-government organizations consist of state-owned corporations,

business enterprises, or public sector undertakings created for com-

mercial activity by the government itself. While strategic management

processes across private and public organizations are well researched

over the last six and four decades successively (Elbanna, Andrews, &

Pollanen, 2016; Furrer, Thomas, & Goussevskaia, 2008; Poister &

Streib, 2005), they have been hardly examined in semi-government

organizations. Hence, the second contribution of this study is its

The measurement items of the study variables are available from the first author upon

request.

JEL classification code: M10.

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2365

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reprodu ction in any medium,

provided the original work is properly cited.

© 2020 The Author. Strategic Change: Briefings in Entrepreneurial Finance published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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