3. Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) - All submissions
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://wiredspace.wits.ac.za/handle/10539/45
Browse
5 results
Search Results
Item Leadership and innovation at the Department of Justice and Constitutional Development(2015) Mashologu, ThembakaziThe South African government is having a problem when it comes to innovative leaders due to many contributing factors that constrain the managers within the public sector. The concept of the service delivery requires leaders that are innovative that will take the public sector to the next level. It is, therefore, essential that public employees, in particular managers, be innovative in order to manage public sector duties effectively. The leader is fundamental in planning, leading and controlling resources to ensure effective service delivery. Public Administration does not operate in isolation, but is exposed to environmental factors such as political, economy, social, technological, environmental and legal. These factors require that public officials, the leadership in particular, display a higher ability to analyse and scrutinise these factors because leadership has an influence on internal departmental operations. The intentions of the South African government by 2030 as stated on the National Development Plan (NDP). The NDP shows intentions that require leaders who will lead in a creative and innovative way as the issues that have to be tackled by 2030 are issues that are in a way concerned with service delivery. The Department of Justice and Constitutional Development (DOJ&CD) is one of the departments in South Africa that striving to be best performers in the public sector. However, there is a gap that needs to be identified into why it is not amongst the top performers within the public sector. The methodology used in this study takes the form of in depth interviews with questionnaire designed to identify and measure the leadership and innovation at the DOJ&CD. The study analyzed leadership and innovation, particularly the management leadership, by scrutinizing managers at the higher courts and regional office in Gauteng. Interviews with managers were used to determine the leadership and innovation of managers to lead the higher courts in Gauteng. The study showed that there is a need for the leaders within the public service to be innovative in their areas of responsibilities.Item Strategic entrepreneurship and performance of small and medium enterprises in South Africa.(2012-10-16) Mohutsiwa, MosheThe aim of this paper is to investigate the link between strategic entrepreneurship and company performance. For the purpose of this study, strategic entrepreneurship is divided into two sections; entrepreneurial orientation and planning flexibility. The entrepreneurial orientation factors used are proactiveness, risk-taking and innovativeness. A survey was conducted on 133 SMEs’ representatives on a purposive and convenience basis. The results of the study indicate that, in the South African context, SMEs need to be proactive, take risks and be innovative to influence their own performance. The study further indicates that flexibility in planning is vital for the improved performance of SMEs. The external environment influences the relationship between entrepreneurial orientation, planning flexibility and a firm’s performance. These results correlate with the existing literature on the entrepreneurial orientation, flexibility in planning and performance of SMEs. The findings of this survey and this research paper should serve to benefit entrepreneurs and SME owners and managers and encourage them to develop entrepreneurial orientation and planning flexibility programmes.Item Perceptions of opportunity recognition behaviour in the South African financial sector(2012-09-26) Wood, Eric AnthonyThe world is in the midst of a new wave of economic development with entrepreneurship and innovation as the catalysts. The ability to continually innovate and to engage in an ongoing process of entrepreneurial action has become the source of competitive advantage and a lack of entrepreneurial actions in today’s global economy could be a recipe for failure (Kuratko, 2009). Organisations need to keep abreast of developments in their business environment and continually identify and evaluate opportunities if they are to prosper in a rapidly changing world, and they must become more entrepreneurial as their corporate environments become more dynamic and increasingly competitive (Shepherd, Patzelt and Haynie, 2009). Opportunity recognition remains an important issue for academic research. This research report aims at making a modest contribution to further understand opportunity recognition behaviour of employees within their existing work environment. The research focussed on employees working in the South African financial sector, and examined their perceptions of opportunity recognition behaviours and motivators. An understanding of these important behaviours and motivators will allow senior management of corporate entities to have a better understanding of the opportunity recognition processes by employees, and to put in place mechanisms that facilitate and support these processes in search of robust entrepreneurial activities. Apart from the economic rationale, the motivations for studying employees’ behaviour come mainly from the limited number of studies of this nature that have been carried out in emerging economies. The study is performed using data from 195 employees drawn from 23 financial sector companies in South Africa. This research concludes that South African financial sector employees perceive themselves as showing strong levels of opportunity recognition behaviours, and opportunity recognition motivators are also perceived important in promoting entrepreneurial initiatives. The empirical study reveals that there is a significant positive relationship between opportunity recognition behaviours and the frequency of opportunities recognised. vi Success is found to have a moderating effect on the relationship between frequency of opportunity recognition and perceptions of opportunity recognition behaviours. Respondents, who have a low or medium number of successfully implemented opportunities, recognise a higher number of opportunities as their opportunity recognition behaviour increases. However, those respondents with a high number of successfully implemented opportunities tend to show a slight decrease in the total number of opportunities identified as their opportunity recognition behaviour increases. A cluster analysis was carried out to provide a deeper understanding of opportunity recognition behaviours and motivators, and three distinct clusters with differing characteristics were identified. These clusters are named according to the characteristics displayed by the respective clusters (corporate achievers, mavericks, and doers). The corporate achievers cluster tends to perceive high levels of opportunity recognition behaviours and motivators. This high proportion of perceived alignment to company strategy combined with high levels of opportunity recognition behaviours may encourage more of the proposed opportunities to be in line with company strategy, which in turn may lead to the higher proportion of successfully implemented opportunities. The mavericks cluster recognise a large number of opportunities, but are behind the corporate achiever cluster when it comes to the proportion of successfully implemented opportunities and perceive low alignment to company strategy. Although this cluster shows a large proportion of opportunities proposed for their current company, their low perception of alignment to company strategy may mean that the opportunities they recommend do not always fit into the company strategy, which may explain their lower proportion of successfully implemented opportunities. The doers cluster tends to perceive low levels of opportunity recognition behaviour and motivators, as well as low levels of alignment to company strategy. Respondents in this cluster seem to do their work, but show low levels of entrepreneurial orientation.Item Educational leadership and the management of change in higher education : implication of module-based teaching and learning at National University of Rwanda.(2012-02-10) Nkurikiyumukiza, PhocasOn the assumption that leadership involves individuals with distinct qualities who take much ingenuity, energy and skills to trigger greater capacity in the organization for moving people towards organizational vision and goal achievement, the aim of this study is to identify and describe the leadership shown by managers and lecturers for the successful implementation of academic programme change at National University of Rwanda. That includes investigating the improvement of academic practice in the higher education institution while implementing change, i.e. introduction of the Module-Based Teaching and Learning (MBTL) methodology which is a new approach to schooling, as well as defining an appropriate leadership style needed for the management of this implementation. The research was carried out at National University of Rwanda as a case study and supported by the aid of interviews with faculty managers and lecturers as they are the main developers and users of teaching and learning programmes. Next, data collected were complemented by means of textual analysis. The findings revealed that the MBTL introduced at NUR as an innovation in academic practice was a top-down decision made by the policy makers without consultation with academic staffs and implemented without adequate preparation whereas they are the main actors in the implementation. Coupled with the change in the language of instruction from French to English and the lack of educational material required by the MBTL approach, the situation had an unenthusiastic impact on the engagement of NUR academics for accurate successful implementation. The overall conclusion is that inadequate management of the introduction of an educational change programme leads to misadoption and reluctance at best and resistance by the implementers at worst.Item Business model reinvention for enabling disruptive innovation(2011-12-12) Habtay, Solomon RussomOver the last two decades, extensive research has been undertaken to understand incumbent firms’ adaptation behavior to disruptive innovation, considering technological change as the most important focus of analysis. Recently, there is an emerging literature that views disruptive innovation as a business model problem in which a technological innovation is deployed. In this literature, disruptive innovation is understood to be primarily a function of conflict between an incumbent’s traditional and an entrant’s new business model. This raises two major questions. First, although the original theory of disruptive innovation evolved from technological studies, this theory persists to explain all types of disruptive innovation over time (Markides, 2006: 19). Furthermore, disruptive innovation has always been studied from an incumbent firm perspective. With the need to shift the research focus from a technology to a business model, we also need a new framework to understand disruptive innovation taking the business model as the unit of analysis taking both the entrant’s and incumbent’s perspectives. Building on business model innovation studies (Govindarajan and Gupta, 2001; Normann, 2001; Hamel, 2000) and the established technology based disruptive innovation theory (Christensen and Raynor, 2003; Christensen, 1997), this study offers a systematic business model framework to comprehend disruptive phenomenon from both an incumbent’s and an entrant’s perspectives. Second, disruptive innovation studies predominantly focus on high-tech industries. Increasingly many low-tech industries are being affected by disruptive non-technological market-driven business model innovations. Considering that disruptive innovation theory is principally iii technology based, a review of the literature suggests that we know little about the differences between high-tech and low-tech market-driven disruptive innovations in terms of their evolutions, competitive and disruptive effects. From the strategic management literature point of view, the contribution of this study becomes even more relevant when the two questions are examined across economic regions. Although there is ample evidence that shows disruptive innovations are not always restricted to developed economies, little is known about how incumbents in developing economies adapt their organizations to disruptive business model innovations. This study takes South Africa as a development economy case-study. The empirical setting of the current study includes four South African industries: the mobile and IT industry (high-tech), banking, insurance and airlines (lowtech) industries. In addressing the two key question of the study, the dissertation presents the empirical analysis at the first-order (firm-level study) and second-order (high-tech vs. low-etch study) levels. The first-order study argues that an innovation creates and grows a niche market through radical product design, different core competencies and/or a different revenue model long before it becomes disruptive innovation. It proposes a framework that attempts to model the evolution of this trajectory from an entrant’s perspective. From the entrant’s perspective, a potentially disruptive business model innovation is a process that evolves over time in successive adaptations to endogenous and exogenous innovation drivers that shape the evolution and path of the new business model. An innovation becomes disruptive only when the new business model fully or partially affects an incumbent’s established business model and market. iv Taking the viewpoint of an incumbent firm, the first-order study further offers a framework that seeks to provide a causality model to comprehend the root cause of disruptive innovation and its impact on the incumbent’s traditional business model. One of the major causes of disruptive innovation is the incumbent’s entrepreneurial dilemma. This means that an incumbent’s success or failure is partly contingent on the senior corporate management’s entrepreneurship readiness that is manifested in terms of taking risk initiative, willingness and ability to take appropriate strategic approaches to enable disruptive innovation. By articulating the causes of disruptive innovation, it suggests four key strategic approaches an incumbent should follow to enable disruptive innovation. While the study finds common patterns for the causes and approaches among incumbents across the four industries at a firm-level, some of the hypotheses of this study could not be proven at an aggregated system level. Disruptive innovation is a relative phenomenon: Some innovations that are disruptive to some firms or industries may not be disruptive to other firms or industries. Therefore, the study further re-examines the aggregated firm-level outcomes by disaggregating the data into dichotomous technology versus marketdriven disruptive innovations. By conducting a second-order analysis at the innovation category level, this study adds considerably to extant innovation literature by establishing that a lowtechnology market-driven disruptive business model innovation entails different business model evolutionary processes, different disruptive effects and different managerial implications compared to high-tech disruptive innovation.