Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-1-2015

Abstract

Organizations have for long used strategy as a springboard for actualization of their strategic intent. The body of knowledge around strategy formulation is well established, but there is less clarity as to how organizations implement strategy to close the gap between their intent and reality. This research seeks to understand how organizations engage in strategy execution so as to reduce the “execution gap”. We uncover patterns in strategic practices with a view to conceptualize how gap reduction happens and what mechanisms influence it. We identify a number of dynamic environmental forces and mutually recursive organizational factors that mutually influence organization’s engagement within the apex of strategy formulation and implementation. Many findings support earlier studies on the prominence of individual factors influencing organizational effectiveness in closing the execution gap. In addition, we uncover three key dynamics associated with strategy execution: 1). The dynamics created by the interactions between the organizational shifts and environmental shifts which we call the execution gap dynamic; 2). The dynamics created by the interactions between the strategy focusing and the gap reduction activities of the organization which we call the gap reduction dynamic; 3) The dynamics created by the interactions between the strategy configuration and the execution capability of the organization which we refer to as the execution focusing dynamic. These three forces are inter-connected, multi-dimensional and recursive.

Keywords

organizational behavior, management, Weatherhead School of Management, strategy, strategy execution, strategy implementation, strategy execution gap

Rights

© The Author(s). This is an open access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Department/Center

Design & Innovation

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