Date of Award

5-2017

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

Department

Business Administration

First Advisor

Said Elbanna

Second Advisor

James Thomas Kunnanatt

Third Advisor

Munjed Maraqa

Abstract

This study presents one of the first attempts to empirically test a conceptual model that discusses the effect of four factors; namely, decentralization of strategic planning, personnel commitment, senior management support, and importance of the strategic plan, on the success of strategic plan implementation and investigate whether the success of the strategic plan implementation affects organizational performance. Environmental munificence and organizational size are used as control variables in this investigation.

This research targeted executive managers, senior analysts and strategic advisers in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government organizations. The research sample covered all the relevant public bodies. Out of 290 bodies, 219 bodies agreed to participate in the study, with 125 of them completing the study questionnaire (57% response rate). Path analysis was used via the AMOS software to test the hypotheses presented in the conceptual model of the study.

The findings show that decentralization of strategic planning, personnel commitment to strategic plan implementation, and senior management support have a positive impact on the success of strategic plan implementation. However, the empirical testing of the importance of a strategic plan is not significant for implementation success. The findings also indicate that success of strategic plan implementation has a positive impact on organizational performance. Similarly, the results indicate that environmental munificence has a positive impact on both the success of strategic plan implementation and organizational performance, justifying its use as a control variable. The results further indicate that the other control variable employed (i.e., organizational size) had no impact on either success of implementation or organizational performance.

In addition to the above investigation, this research assesses the tools of strategic planning that are most commonly used at present in the UAE public organizations and highlights the key challenges that the UAE public organizations face in implementing their strategic plans.

The research mainly focuses on the public sector in the UAE. Previous research was very limited on both strategic plan implementation and the UAE public sector and therefore the findings will, it is hoped, make a major contribution to the literature in this area. Both the managerial and the academic implications of my findings for practitioners and scholars respectively are also discussed.

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