STRATEGIC MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE IN COMPETITIVE BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS

The fact that business is increasingly becoming competitive requires businesses to be under continuous pressure to enhance their performance along with the adaptability to the cloudiness of the markets and its more sophisticated strategies. The ways of strategic management have therefore emerged as critical to enable the organisations to harmonise strategic intent and viable performance outcomes with actual implementation. The proposed research targets at exploring the impacts of the strategic management practices on the organizational performance within a competitive environment and how environmental pressures can be used in improving the strategic management practices. It is a qualitative multiple-case study synthesis research design, which in itself makes use of the available information given in the published open-source case studies in different industries, including banking, healthcare, manufacturing, regulatory bodies, and small and medium-sized businesses. Data analysis was conducted using within case and cross case thematic analysis in order to identify some general trends of strategic management practices and their performance results. The findings indicate that performance of organizations is improved by making strategic management practices cut across planning, implementation, evaluation and adaptation processes. Strategic implementation, management sensitivity to competition pressures and capability was found to be the determinants of financial and non-financial performance. The study finds that strategic management practices are dynamic processes through which organizations will work in competitive environment to sustain performance. The findings are valuable to managers and policy makers who may be keen on improving strategic capability within competitive business settings.