Enablers and barriers to effective strategy implementation in a South African financial institution

Abstract

Strategy implementation forms part of the broader concept and critical aspect of strategic management which is practiced across many organisations in South Africa. However, it has been found through the abundance of literature that most organisations put more emphasis, focus on strategy formulation, and neglect strategy implementation. The number of existing strategy formulation frameworks supports this view, while scholars have not reached a consensus on the most effective frameworks for strategy implementation. Based on the high failure rate on strategy implementation, ranging between 60% and 90%, this exploratory study will seek to understand factors impacting effective strategy implementation in a South African context for a financial institution. Qualitative research was undertaken to further explore this study, wherein data was collected through an electronic survey from employees within the financial institution who specifically work in the Strategy Enablement Office. The data analysis yielded findings that identified five key factors impacting strategy implementation: leadership and culture, strategy implementation, employee understanding, regular feedback, and organisational performance. Out of these factors, the findings indicated that regular feedback and employee understanding were considered significantly important to strategy implementation. Leadership and culture and organisational performance had a positive impact but were not significant, according to the data collected for a specific financial institution. The study confirmed the importance of strategy implementation and the key factors that lie under it; however, the study also revealed that the organisation will need to put more effort into senior leadership involvement and provide regular feedback to employees during strategy implementation. Therefore, some recommendations put forward are to ensure senior leadership’s greater involvement during strategy implementation and to be provided with training interventions in this regard to mitigate the risk of nonchalant behaviour by senior management during the implementation phase. The study contributes to helping teams working in strategy enablement across the organisation, to gain insights on which factors to focus on and which ones are potential blind spots during strategy implementation to improve organisational performance.