Strategic Planning In Strategic Management

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Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) contribute for 56% of total employment to the Dutch economy (CBS, 2010). Opposed to their larger counterparts, these SMEs have limited resources and have to deal with relative more uncertainty. As all firms, SMEs have to effectively use their resources to survive. Many of these small and medium companies are dedicating resources to strategic planning in the post start-up phase (Storey and Greene, 2010). One of the main purposes of strategic planning is to promote the process of adaptive thinking or thinking about how to attain and maintain firm-environment alignment (Ansoff, 1991) and to devise ways to handle uncertainty (Foster, 1993). Strategic planning should contribute to an alignment of resources with…show more content…
Early studies suggested a positive relationship, later studies found no significant relationship (Rudd et al., 2008). The mixed results of previous studies may be related to the following reasons. First, scholars have conducted research on strategic planning, but many of these articles do not include a clear conceptual and operational definition of strategic planning (Rudd et al., 2008). Therefore, scholars are measuring (slightly) different constructs of strategic planning in organizations. As a consequence, studies are limited comparable and the field remains scattered. Second, authors use different concepts of firm performance, both financial and non-financial performance, to link strategic planning to firm performance. Hamann et al (2013) show the wide variety of measures of firm performance measures used by scholars and show that some measures might even be negatively correlated to each other. Therefore, dimensions of firm performance as used by researchers are not…show more content…
Rudd et al. (2008) found evidence for the mediating role of flexibility of the firm in the strategic planning - firm performance relationship. The need for more research on moderating and mediating variables in this relationship is also argued for by Ouakouak and Mbengue (2013). Theory predicts that successful organizations will anticipate and address environmental turbulence through strategic planning, but there is little evidence yet on the role of the environment when flexibility is included in the relationship (Miller and Cardinal, 1994; Rogers et al., 1999). Although there are studies that investigate the role of organizational flexibility, the evidence is still thin and not yet specified to SMEs. The focus on SMEs is important, since SMEs have to be flexible, since they lack the opportunity to reap scale economies (Man et al. 2002). This study will include organizational flexibility and environmental turbulence in the relationship between strategic planning and firm performance. The moderating effect of environmental turbulence on the organizational flexibility - firm performance relationship is based on the argument that organizational flexibility is stronger beneficial to firm performance in turbulent than in stable
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