Abstract

STRATEGY FORMULATION AND IMPLEMENTATION IN ZIMBABWE FOOD MANUFACTURING SECTOR (2006 -2013) A key preoccupation of strategic management for competitive advantage as a field of study is the identification of sources of heterogeneous performance among food manufacturing firms in Zimbabwe in terms of their competitiveness. The main theories of the study of strategy formulation and implementation in the Zimbabwe’s food manufacturing sector includes contingency theory, Porter's positioning theory, resource-based view and its derivatives and environmental theories and offer varying views explaining the potential reasons for deriving superior rent. Empirical studies in the field of strategic management have mainly focused on two main streams of research: (i) the relationship between how strategy is formulated in a firm and firm performance and (ii) the relationship between the content of strategy and firm performance. A third area of interest is strategy implementation, but unlike the other two areas, strategy implementation in the food manufacturing organisations has not received much empirical interest. The results of the previous studies examining the relationship between strategy formulation and corporate performance and marketing strategy content and performance have been inconclusive. Some studies have reported positive relationships, while others found no relationship. The previous studies also suffered from a number of methodological inadequacies such as inconsistent operationalization of the constructs, unclear definition of industry sectors and small sample size. Only a few studies have focused on Zimbabwean based organizations. In addition there is a dearth of empirical research using Zimbabwean based food manufacturing organizations. The study reported in this thesis examines the impact of strategy formulation and strategy implementation on food manufacturing organizations in Zimbabwe regarding competitive performance, all within a single study. As far as the author was able to establish by examining the previous studies, none of the previous studies have looked into strategy formulation in the food manufacturing industry in Zimbabwe, business-level strategy and strategy implementation in the food industry simultaneously in a single study. Furthermore this study considers the moderating effects of environment on the relationship between strategy formulation and implementation and strategy content and competitive performance. Based on the literature review a conceptual model of strategy formulation and implementation in food manufacturing organizations in Zimbabwe was proposed and the hypotheses to be tested were derived. These hypotheses were classified into two groups namely (i) hypotheses for validating the findings of previous studies and (ii) hypotheses which have not been tested in previous studies. Hypotheses in the first group have examined the impact of strategy formulation, business-level strategy and strategy implementation on organizational competitive performance in the manufacturing sector. Hypotheses in the second group have examined the interrelationships between strategy formulation, business-level strategy and strategy implementation.