Conceptualizing the Nature of Strategic Execution to Organizational Strategies Implementation

The implementation of strategies is regarded as a significant factors for organizational success. Various corporate strategies of the organizations may never be implemented or fail while implementation. Lack of comprehensive knowledge of strategy, insufficient understanding of employees at the organization level, and the lack of a clear and accepted concept of strategic implementation in the organization might lead to failure in implementation of organizational strategies. Since execution has been translated and studied from different perspectives in the strategic management literature in Iran, and sometimes there is no clear concept of execution or implementation, this research aims to explain the differences between strategic execution and strategy implementation. The purpose of this study is to develop a new concept and nature of strategic implementation and design a process model of effective components for the implementation of strategies in Iranian organizations. This will be conducted from the perspective of senior managers and the strategy of the Iranian automotive industry. 

This research has employed a qualitative approach, which is conducted based on a relativistic ontological approach and a subjective epistemological position. Since the purpose of this study is to create a theory that explains the concept and nature of "strategic execution", the basic theory is preferred and has been conducted using Charms' constructivist approach. Participants were selected based on purposeful and chain sampling. After conducting 16 in-depth and semi-structured interviews, theoretical saturation was achieved using the theoretical sampling strategy. 

The results indicated that the nature of strategic implementation includes individual, organizational-structural, and operational dimensions. This phenomenon is made up of productive/fertile, directing, effective, and motivating/moving levers, each has been constructed by other concepts. Disruptive forces from inside and outside the organization are also effective in constructing the dimensions of the nature of strategic implementation. The manifestation of this phenomenon can be observed both inside and outside the organization. 

Strategic implementation is one of the strategy implementation stages in the organization, which refers to the changing of the upstream strategy into a downstream strategy. A common understanding of strategy should be developed at the organizational level. For this purpose, employees and managers of the organization must recognize and prioritize the four levers affected by the dimensions of the nature of strategic implementation. The nature and dimensions of strategic implementation are made up of the shared interactions among these four levers. Based on the obtained data in this study, we could not discover the specific precedence of these four levers; besides, we were not able to observe any significant one-way relationships between them. Nonetheless, it is necessary to be aware of the disruptive environmental and organizational forces in order to neutralize them.