CHAPTER 2: REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
2.6 Strategic leadership
2.6.2 The What, How and Who of strategic leadership
In the viewpoint of Beatty and Quilm (2002) strategic leadership has three parts, what it achieves, how it is accomplished, and who in an organization has the main responsibility for leading strategically.
The 'what of strategic leadership basically entails the producing of a competitive
advantage. The how, involves the thinking, acting and influencing aspects of strategic leadership. Strategic thinking is vital and "involves gathering information, making connections among the various pieces of information, and filtering the information to form ideas and strategies that are focused, relevant, and sound" (Bcatty and Quinn, 2002:5). Business today occurs in rapidly changing, increasingly globalized business
environments. These environments lead to circumstances that are ambiguous and sometimes even contradictory. Anticipating and reacting to these circumstances is a
key to success. It is the task of strategic leaders to ensure that the organization stays on the right course in the midst of these environmental conditions. They do this by constantly scanning the internal (its mission, the organizational culture and values, employees' capabilities and talents, and budgetary issues) and external environments (market conditions, global economies, changing technology, customers, industry innovations, and shifting supplies of resources) and identifying any aspect that might impact the organization.
Furthermore, although strategic leadership is focused on the long-tenn well being of the organization, the tactical day-to-day operation of the firm is important. The leaders must find a balance between the long-term vision of the firm and the short- term actions. The two perspectives are interconnected and strategic leaders must be able to distinguish between shOli-term issues that bolster the long-term vision and those that are detrimental.
Another aspect is that strategic leaders must influence people at all levels of the organization to work toward the organization's strategic goals by giving them a clear sense of the strategy and how it applies to their specific jobs and roles. As Becker (http://198.231.69.12/papers/nssc/nssc6/becker.pdf) quotes Arthur Martinez of Sears,
"If you are unable to galvanize people into action, all the thinking, the analysis, the strategic prioritization does not matter at all".
An ongoing debate is on who provides strategic leadership. The strategy literature (Kotler, 1982; Mintzberg, 1973; Gupta, 1984 cited in Shrivastava and Nachman, 1989) presumes that strategic leadership of organizations is primarily provided by chief executives, presidents or general managers. In agreement, Hagen et a1. (2001) said that the primary responsibility of strategic leadership lies with the Chief Executive Officer. Also, as Cannella and Monroe (1997:213) said (citing Hambrick &
Mason), strategic leadership theory argues that "organizations are reflections of top managers and the specific knowledge, experience, values, and preferences of top managers are reflected not only in their decisions, but in their assessments of decision situations". Hitt et a1. (2003) concur that the top management team is responsible for
formulating and implementing the organization's strategies. They also assert that as strategic leaders, top management must guide the firm in ways that result in the formation of a strategic intent and strategic mission, and must facilitate the development of appropriate strategic actions and determine how to implement them.
However, the influence of individuals on organizational performance has been said to be ambiguous. In a study aimed at challenging the assumption that only CEOs provide strategic leadership in organizations, Shrivastava and Nachman (1989) did not debunk the critical role of top managers in strategic leadership, although they suggested that individual managers are not indispensable to the strategic leadership of organizations.
Beatty and Quinn (2002) added that it is a mistake to think that only senior officers can be strategic leaders. "Individuals whose decisions have effects beyond their own functional areas often have opportunities to think, act, and influence as strategic leaders" (Beatty and Quinn, 2002:7).
Moreover Ireland and Hitt (1999) said that having strategic leadership centered on a single person or a few people at the top of a hierarchical pyramid is increasingly counterproductive. According to them, "conditions associated with the global economy's new competitive landscape; shorter product life cycles, ever-accelerating rates and types of change, the explosion of data and the need to convert it to useable information, prevent single individuals from having all of the insights necessary to chart a firm's direction" (Ireland and Hitt, 1999:45).
In concurrence, Homer (1997:275) maintains, "leaders become great by unleashing the potential and abilities of followers, consequently having the knowledge of many people instead of relying solely on their own skills and abilities". Successful leadership thus involves the contributions of various great thinkers and doers. People working together in an organization need to develop socially understood interpretations so they can be effective as a group. Leadership thus requires participation from everyone in the organization so that "all members are engaged in creating meaning and acting on that meaning" (Drath and Palus, cited by Homer, 1997:277).
Zaleznik (1992) also added that power in the hands of an individual entails human risks. These are, among others, the risk of equating power with the ability to get immediate results, the risk of ignoring the many different ways people can legitimately accumulate power and the risk of losing self-control in the desire for power.