Environmental Factors and Corporate Strategy-Structure Choices for Organizational Effectiveness

Abstract

Business organizations, being social entities, can never be environment-apathetic as their strategic, structural, and operational choices for effectiveness depend largely on the conditions of the environment they are surviving in.

The current study was designed to examine how environmental conditions influence corporate strategy-structure choices, and how their alignment contributes to organizational effectiveness.

The data, for explanatory quantitative cross-sectional survey, were collected through a semi-structured questionnaire from conveniently/purposively selected 55 corporate managers and tabulated in the form of frequencies, ranks, and percentages.

Results reveal that in traditional mechanistic flat structures based on strategic priorities, business organizations are primarily focusing on leadership, economic factors, work specialization, competition, customer satisfaction, and growth in an effort to be the best with a high goal achievement and stagnant market shares reflecting a question-mark status.

The study recommends that business organizations may strengthen environmental scanning and strategic responsiveness, competitive intelligence and competitor analysis, and ensure flexibility for contingency leading to an integrated strategy-structure-environment framework for decision-making and periodically reassess the alignment among environment, strategy, structure, and organizational effectiveness.

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