Effectiveness and Failure of Strategic Management Tools - ANOVA - Case Study Example

The paper ' Effectiveness and Failure of Strategic Management Tools - ANOVA" is a good example of a management case study. While acknowledging that SWOT is, like any other tool, subject to being adversely affected by poor or incomplete information, the managers generally gave it high marks for its usefulness as a tool to gather and impose some basic organisation on required informational inputs. Another aspect of the SWOT Analysis that seems to appeal to Saudi firms is its relative simplicity; many managers cited frustration with the lack of familiarity amongst their firms’ employees with more complex tools but did not perceive the same difficulties with SWOT. The pattern of usage appears to be that SWOT can be used at any level of the firm – thus increasing participation in the planning process – to gather a broad range of information in an organised way; this information is then sifted to extract the priority inputs to whichever of the two main SMTs (CSF or BSC) the firm is using.

8.3.6 To what extent does the organisational context contribute to the effectiveness or failure of strategic management tools?

As Gunn and Williams (2007: 212) observed, the results of studies of this nature support the assertion that in order to understand managers’ decision-making choices and processes, the environment in which the managers make their decisions must be understood. This was the objective of the sixth of this study’s research questions, “To what extent does the organisational context contribute to the effectiveness or failure of strategic management tools?” Gunn and Williams (2007) suggest, however, that organisational context alone does not provide a complete understanding, but that the relevant personal characteristics of the manager – educational attainment, career experience, and even cultural orientations – all play a role.

That is a reasonable assumption, but one advantage to a study of the nature of the current one is that defining the scope of the study to a particular cultural environment and a particular – albeit still large and diverse – a subset of organisational types, i.e., exchange-listed firms removes some of the variability amongst individual managers.