Strategy Development, Implementation and Context in Organizational Stability: A Critical Literature Review

Background: Lack of consciousness of the business environment can lead to unforeseen sudden catastrophic outcomes. Pandemics, wars and extreme weather conditions have obviously interrupted firms’ operations. Covid-19, Russia-Ukraine War, Tsunamis and cyclones come to mind. Therefore, there is need for conscious effort by scholars, strategists and management to reinforce strategy development and implementation practices in varying contexts with a purpose to spur organizational stability and consequently growth. Method: Qualitative research conducted through critical literature review. The researchers sampled the scholarly views on strategy development and implementation mediated by context. Results: When sound strategies in firms are developed and implemented from time to time with context sensitivity, there is bound to be a corresponding desired outcome in organizational stability. Conclusions: The literature review in this paper has revealed that the concepts of strategy development and strategy implementation are still equivocal to many a firm and scholars with regards to practice, research and policy. Organizational context mindfulness is even hazier. Worse still, scholars and managers are yet to agree on definition of terms, processes and measurements of organizational performance and stability in specific contexts. The researchers observed that they all had different notions about strategy as a concept, leave alone its development and implementation procedures with mindfulness to context. Organizational stability, as a measure of achievement, is a rare dependent variable in research and even scarcer objective in many firms’ policies. However, a few scholars have actually come up with tangible measures to the dependent variable in question. Cartels for example are formed by some organizations to ward off competition from undesired quarters thereby allowing the colluding firms to maintain their clientele base and bottom-line. Maintaining board membership and other stakeholders such as employees and suppliers in the long term is another indicator of mindfulness towards firms’ sustenance, especially in the eyes of shareholders and customers. Innovating firms also participate in continuous improvement to sustain their strongholds. This is usually done in response to and mindfulness of changes in the environment.