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Other access options You may be able to access this content by logging in via your Emerald profile. Rent this content from DeepDyve. Source: own processing. On the basis of this knowledge, we have discovered several facts. The first one is the economic depression impact on strategic decision making even in small corporations. Rescheduling and organizing changes were represented in order to save costs because of economic depression. However, challenges relating to marketing strategy and its delimitation or appropriate selection of customers and their satisfaction dominated.
The explanation of this is that the employee's loyalty in small corporations is a bigger factor, informal relations dominate, and the managers do not have issues, for example, relating to human resources. It is more and more connected with higher and more intensive changes that are often unpredictable and managers, while they make strategic decisions, have to also direct and assist employees, learning, and knowledge.
It is necessary to encourage their employee's creativity, entrepreneurism, initiative, and ability to work in teams in order that everybody can be involved in customer satisfaction and company improvement. In the future employees with different professional qualifications, good working profiles and higher secondary and university degrees will be necessary in small corporations. The employees will need to improve their abilities and specialist skills. Especially, they have to attract people with the highest qualification through the process of lifelong education at the company to get over problems.
It is necessary to invest in electronic skills, to spread employment procedures for new groups of the population, and to develop the concept of feasibility and foster labor mobility. It is also necessary so that managers are aware of the fact that the employees represent the most valuable company asset and that's why it is necessary to ensure the strong company cultural orientation for employee training and development plus the empowerment of individual workers.
They have to have an interesting job and be motivated in the most appropriate way. A functioning system is a guarantee of knowledge management. Through the analysis of strategic areas of small corporations, we found certain reserves in strategic orientation for innovation and technological progress. At present, innovation is more important to survival and business prosperity than ever before.
Markets have been changing rapidly and the competition of a developing economy for instance, China and India has been bigger and bigger. For small corporations, we can see a bigger challenge in carrying out research and development as well as accomplishing innovation than for big business. Small corporations often lack the financial resources needed to carry out research and therefore need to look for a competent business partner to create their own ideas and provide access to programs that result in innovation.
Innovation is not only a problem for small corporations in Slovakia, even in businesses of medium size and big businesses innovative activity lags behind most other EU countries.
The replacement of employees by a highly qualified work force will give power to the manager and create new opportunities. These were proposed by Dean and Sharfman [ 7 ]. Information is the predisposition for conceptual and competent control and the ability to operatively influence the course of controlled processes and to flexibly react to the changing conditions in both interior and exterior entrepreneur environment. We have divided managers into two types based on their approach to decision making with low or high amounts of required information:.
Managers with maximalist approach acquisition and analysis of great amount of information. The first group is made by managers, called maximizers. Their goal is to search, accommodate, and restlessly look through a mass of data, before making a decision. The second group is composed by managers, who only need the key facts, and if these satisfy their conditions—they decide. We call them satisfiers managers optimize the amount of information.
It is obvious that managers of small corporations are more likely to incline to a restricted rational model of the process of decision making, it comes from partial information, which is sufficient for a satisfying decision. The maximization of effectiveness is not always a primary concern in these businesses.
In the fields of information search, we were concerned about their resources, meaning: where do managers get their Intel from. Our research was based on their division into internal and external strategic information.
Internal, the one that comes straight from within the business information about the sources of the business and their use also information about borderline situations experienced in the business, etc. A question was opened, to allow the gain of deeper insight into ways of collecting information. The overview is shown in Graph 2.
Sources of information for managers. The results lead us to the fact that small corporations in contrast with big which dispose with a vast source for systematic global, and targeted monitoring have a much worse situation to handle in this field. Their ability to gain information is significantly reduced in financial, human, material, and technological areas.
The greatest source of information for these businesses is customers. Thus, the main principle is to stay close to customers and adapt strategical decisions to the demand. Then, with the same approximate representation come vocational magazines, friends and family, informal relationships, and everyday dialogs with other entrepreneurs.
Information required for strategical decision making of small corporations comes mainly from external sources. It is required to note that search for information is not mostly conducted on a systematic basis. It is based on random occasions; it is time and resource restricted, and considerably subjective.
When analyzing and processing information, managers followed up in responses to the previous question of gaining information. The nonexistent means for extensive databases, statistical and quantitative analyses, report on both financial and expert level, and restrict efforts put in decision making from reaching maximal value from the information. From the results of our research, we have ultimately discovered the lack of correct and clear presentation of information. Many managers still control and decide as if there was no worldwide computer grid.
This problem has several aspects. Ultimately, such analyses are ignored in favor of the institution and comfortable, old practices. Most of the small corporations do not know what their best decisions were and how could information and technologies be used to make those decisions more informed. Managers in our test sample were supposed to place themselves into one of the four given types based on the amount of information and possibilities.
The most frequent style of small corporation managers was decisive style—meaning that the managers stated need for less information and narrow focus when it comes to selecting options. Such managers recognize rapid action and effectiveness and consistency in the absence of time and resources. Flexible style is the second most common. However, its representation is significantly lower and managers who identified it as used by them use it properly, in times of relative uncertainty, when there is need for quick changes of direction, based on the change of conditions.
Hierarchical style is regarded as highly analytical, explaining its small representation in our test sample. Integrating style did not occur in the sample. This style requires many inputs, time, constantly opened information flows, a wide range of views, including contradictory ones, and mostly gives just framing of decision situation with multiple possible solutions considering changing conditions in complex, dynamic, and turbulent business environment during the global crisis.
To assess a model process of strategic decision making in the sense of assessing its rationality , it was required to research also the use of varying mostly quantitative methods and techniques used for deciding Graph 3.
By studying Graph 3 , it is clear that not only the usage but mainly the knowledge of basic methods is very low when it comes to small corporations. Our opinion is that the reasons are several. Their use is inexpensive, easy, and time effective. In favor of exact methods is also the fact that a part of them is simply integrated chart processors with tools to analyze, communicate, and to share results.
Via this, we can also explain the tendency to not use, or rather not know specific managing methods. Then again in case of knowing these, it is characteristic to lack practical experience with using such methods. Another reason is obviously the impracticality of some methods in certain sections of control. The usage, or rather the resting of some software to support decision making, is conditioned by financial and human resources.
A manager of a small corporation is not capable of maintaining the required level of expertise in several fields at once. It is limited by expert capabilities of managers, it works with deficient information. Another field that we surveyed at managers in order to determine the type of strategic decision making was an area of Judgment. Judgment represents a mental activity, which is also participating in solving problems and decisions.
Judgment is the process through which we think about, form our opinions, achieve conclusions, and critically assess actions around us; it is based on an available information and also is a source for decision making.
Managers were asked about their way of judgment to find out specific facts, situations, and events from which we could derive certain conclusions within the meaning of determining the model of the strategic decision making. The feedback is clear that the dominant model is intuitive model. Managers on a regular basis possibly every day act without apparent use of all relevant information that is available from the environment and their memories.
Even if they are aware of all the details, they necessarily do not investigate them deeply and do not always give the appropriate importance, before the decision. On the contrary, they often deal with the first what they think of.
It usually occurs without some apparent effort and they cannot answer the question of why they come up with such a proposal. Managers often tend to trust their intuition, simply because it is quite successful in some cases. It seems like it is possible for them to be satisfied with intuition in many situations.
Ahmed , H. Karanja Published 5 June Computer Science Business Management and Strategy The theories and models underpinning strategic decision-making SDM are somewhat eclectic that demand multidisciplinary approach and appears non-differential from decision-making DM theories.
This paper is a first attempt that puts the discipline into perspective of its coherent whole. We start by defining strategy and SDM in order to set the expectations for the rest of the paper.
View via Publisher. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Background Citations. Methods Citations. Figures, Tables, and Topics from this paper. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Creativity and Strategy. The strategic decision-making SDM research is rooted in the case study approach and therefore may not have considered actual SDM behaviour.
The strategy literature understands creativity within a … Expand. Proposal for a model to hierarchize strategic decisions according to criteria of value innovation, sustainability and budgetary constraint. Journal of Cleaner Production.
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