Identifying strategy process ‘pinchpoints': A multi-level, multi-source, longitudinal study of strategy implementation

Well-formulated and appropriate strategies only result in superior returns for an organization when they are implemented successfully. Although a notable amount of research has investigated the strategy implementation process, the reasons for implementation success or failure are not fully understood. More specifically, past research has neglected the relative importance and inter-dependence among multiple strategy diffusion channels (top management, middle management, work group peers), the role of relationship quality (leader-member exchange and team-member exchange), and different dimensions of an employee's organizational identification (commitment to the organization, the supervisor, and the work group). Additionally, many extant studies suffer from methodological constraints including key informant reliance, common method limitations, and cross-sectional designs making inferences from the analysis of causal relationships, at best, equivocal.
We intend to tackle these challenges and examine the strategy implementation process within a Swiss retail bank generating multi-level, multi-source, and longitudinal data. Multiple corridors of influence, the relationship quality among different actors, and the moderating role of commitment, will be explicitly incorporated in the proposed study. Thus, our results will improve the understanding of strategy implementation and help managers to channel strategy implementation efforts effectively.