The proposed research is considered to be performed on the factors that influence the strategic decision making process in organizations’ business turnaround. The major purpose of the research project is to analyse the potential factors that impact the business turnaround. The proposed research focuses on the business turnaround Road Transportation Authority (RTA) in Dubai. RTA is the major independent government road and transportation authority in UAE. Strategic decisions of a business usually appears to be long-term, complex, and inherently risky, while business turnaround is the reversal of falling outcomes of the strategic decisions through a fundamental change; this means a turnaround is the process of gaining financial outcomes out of a business which observed a poor performance. Thereby, the proposed research project will focus on the factors such as poor sales and profits, inappropriate allocation of resources, excessive cost of supply chain management that influence strategic decision making in the business turnaround. This report starts with discussing the major research areas and providing a rationale for performing the research.
The research particularly focuses on the factors in the form of business aspects that are usually considered for Road Transportation. Hence, the areas may include demand, prospects, government’s stake, complementing and supporting factors and supply. So, when analysing the strategic decision making of Road Transportation Authority, the mentioned areas and some other related factors will be covered. In addition to this, the research will show analyse the relation between the factors in strategic decision making and organization turnaround.
It is identified that strategic decision making is one of the significant functions in business of any kind. Due to the involvement of different managers in the process, strategic decision making turns out to be a complex process, which could significantly influences firm’s financial performance. Thus, it is necessary to learn the factors that are usually considered for making strategic decision taking business turnaround in account. Hence, the identification and analysis will help to know how the factors such as leadership, organizational resources internally and supply, demands and market sustainability externally should be considered in strategic decision making for gaining the effect of business turnaround. In addition, the research considers Road Transport Authority (RTA) Dubai because in the recent time due to failure in implementing strategic decisions, the authority is on the verge of observing poor financial performance.
The research aims to explore the factors associated with an organization’s effort to turnaround their business. Business turnaround is achieved by appropriate strategic decision making process but there are other factors associated with the process (Petersen, Kushwaha, and Kumar 2015). It is essential to learn and treat those factors accordingly to reach the turnaround. Thus, the research particularly focuses on the factors; hence business turnaround is the milestone and strategic decision making is the pathway to reach the milestone. Specially, the research pays attention to the factors like leadership, organizational resources, supply and demand and budget.
The following are the key objectives to achieve the stated research aims
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SMART |
Justification |
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Specific |
The objectives will help to learn the specific reasons that due to which business achieves turnaround. In addition, there are several specific strategies or processes used for cutting the cost of operation. Along with the strategies, there are some business models that are applied for strategic decisions making |
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Measurable |
The objective is measurable as the impact of each factor or cause can be measured. In addition, the impact of retrenchment strategies on business can also be measured in business. |
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Attainable |
None of the objectives are broad and generic; the variables mentioned in the objectives are often used by the business; thereby, they are achievable |
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Realistic |
The objectives set above area realistic, as each of the objectives holds a variable such as business turnaround, retrenchment, business models, which are often used by the businesses |
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Time |
The objectives are time-effective as the objectives are specific and relevant to the contemporary business context |
Table 1: SMART Table
This section of the research provides a detailed review of the existing papers that have been conducted on the factors influencing strategic decisions making in organization turnaround. It has been identified that different theoretical models of strategic decision process hold different conceptions of organizations. Such models that certainly differ substantially with respect to their underlying assumptions regarding the decisions context as well as characteristics of decisions techniques are conventionally by variety of factors. In addition to this, the factors influencing the strategic decision-making in particular can be classified into several aspects such as decision-specific characteristics, internal organisational characteristics, external environmental characteristics and management team’s characteristics. When it comes to strategic decisions making process Shepherd and Rudd (2014), mentioned that decision making process may suggest that managers in different organisations or even within the same business could consider the same internal and external problems quite differently; thus, types of the decisions itself could be significant and influence the strategic decision making process. On the other side, Waas et al. (2014) mentioned that the techniques of strategic decision making remains as significant and complex of all functions of the managers in all sort of businesses. This study has particularly investigated the factors that affect the techniques of strategic decision making and were divided into four major categories relying on variety of stages and process in the business. The author termed the factors as the decision specific characteristics, external environmental characteristics internal organizational characteristic and management team’s characteristic.
Azadnia, Saman and Wong (2015) performed a study and found that major focus or aim of business turnaround is to remove or withdraw the organization quickly from any immediate danger of turning into liquidation as well as pay attention to the activities that help to bring back the business value. Thus, to achieve this, the author has suggested few phases that an organization in turnaround situations may need to observe
According to Collett, Pandit and Saarikko (2014), the process of making changes in the organizations could engage the board of directors or senior management identifying that change is required and then start a business turnaround program. On a frequent basis, a business may try to bring an external turnaround specialist such as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) particularly to make complex as well as controversial decisions necessary to restructure the overall business. Hence, the gains of bringing an external specialist could be that i) they have significant turnaround experience along with the justified techniques of achieving turnaround, ii) they do not hold any emotional ground which is associated with any of the business’ previous business decisions as well as are not committed to the status quo (Collett, Pandit and Saarikko 2014).
According to Walsh and Cunningham (2016), the organizations need to quickly identify the fundamental issues that cause the present situation as well as figure out the chances of reactiveness of the business. According to the author this techniques may further include:
Strategy: Hence, the strategy indicates the fact whether the organizations have an adequate and transparent deliverable strategy which sets out the focus for the organization or is the business dealing with the right markets.
Finance: Collett, Pandit and Saarikko (2014) arguably mentioned that instead of making changes in the management, it is necessary for the organisations to figure out the financial capability of the business. According to this author, the organisation needs to find out whether the business has any reliable information on business’ performance as well as financial situations. The business needs to identify whether it is overstaffed or it has right people with right skills.
According to O’Kane and Cunningham (2014) the business needs to find out or identify relevant and appropriate strategist and form an achievable recovery plan along with proper functional actions, which typically may include the restructure outstanding debt obligations, minimized operating expense, increase of management working capital and enhanced product pricing. On the other side, Tangpong, Abebe and Li (2015) mentioned that when restructuring the business plan, the organization needs to streamline the products lines and speed up the growth and development of high potential products. In response to this statement, Pan and Chen (2014) argued that the study does not talk about any compunction plan, this means the business needs to communicate the plan with the potential external parties like banking institution, key suppliers and other creditors who could be critical to obtaining credibility as well as bringing back the confidence in business. A study performed by Collett, Pandit and Saarikko (2014), an effective turnaround could be as simple as dealing with a downturn with the financial performance, which is acceptable to businesses’ multiple stakeholders.
According to Huffman et al. (2014), the strategic capability could affect organizational performance around the world across all business sector is the leadership and the business running in the transportation industry. Nonetheless, there is thousands of widely acknowledged leasers in the sector, and most of them retire in every five years. Consequently, the major issue is that there are no such potent leaders to fill the gap in such a massive range. Therefore, according to the author such extensive lack of talented workers and maximising dependency on younger and inexperienced individuals is also referred to as “Big Crew Chang’. On the other side, layoffs during the times of recession in 1970 as well as 1980 in UAE developed a vacant positions in the industry of generation road construction engineers (Ngah, Tai and Bontis 2016). The author of this article, has also mentioned that leaders in the industry are struggling hard to develop a strong bridge to fill the gaps, which could be further reflected in the strategic decision making. According to Waas et al. (2014), when it comes to making strategic decision making process, the internal factors such as organizational culture and leadership. Furthermore, Shepherd and Rudd (2014) mentioned that organizations that come out of turnaround the are often stronger with respect to leadership, organizational culture, management, operations and responsiveness to market conditions. Thus, having such variables in place during the turnaround, the business is able to plan, manage and respond to the changes in the business environment. Nonetheless, not all business are able to achieve successful turnaround programmes in such way, some organizations could succeed in the omitting their losses to find that they are not able to attain an acceptable return on the investment.
The proposed study includes an exploratory research design because exploratory research design helps to determine the nature of the research problems such as how leadership or supply-demand of business can affect the strategic decision making. Even though exploratory research design is not supposed to provide any conclusive evidence but it certainly helps to enhance a better understanding of the research problems (Taylor, Bogdan and DeVault 2015). On the other side, the proposed study will not use conclusive or descriptive research design as the descriptive research design often becomes deductive in nature in which, the study is required to develop a set of hypothesis to test the existing theories for designing a new strategy. However, the proposed study analyse the existing theory but it will not proposed any new theory.
The data in the proposed study will include both primary and secondary. Hence, the secondary data is referred to the data that have already been published and used in other study, while the primary data is divided into two categories namely qualitative and quantitative. The secondary data will be collected from the reliable secondary sources such as books, journals, peer-reviewed articles, newsletters, etc, while the collection of primary data will include both quantitative and qualitative. The quantitative data will be collected by performing a survey among the employees of RTA, while the qualitative data will be collected by performing interview among the key participants such as stakeholders, managers, leaders who were the witness of the turnaround effort.
As the study includes both quantitative and qualitative data, two different set of questionnaire will be developed such as close-ended and open-ended. Almost 10 different close-ended questions will be developed to perform the survey among the employees of Road Transportation Authority in UAE. On the other side, five different open-ended questions will be developed to perform the interview among the stakeholders, leader, managers and other authorized parties of RTA. The questionnaire will be prepared by using a Google Sheet Form. The interview questionnaire will be emailed to the respondents before starting the interview process, while the survey questionnaire in Microsoft Word file will be distributed among the respondents.
There are two different types of sampling namely probability sampling and non-probability sampling (Robinson 2014). Both the methods first determine the target population who fits into the sampling frame. Hence, the target population is the employees and other organizational members of RTA in Dubai, United Arabian Emirates. Hence, the sampling frame for proposed study has been set out to be 50 for quantitative data collection and 5 managers for qualitative data collection. The study will include non-probability convenient sampling method as each member of the population does not have the opportunity to take part in the study. This because each member of the population does not have equal knowledge about the research context and moreover, before engaging the respondents into the data collection process their availability will be checked, while probability sampling method will not be used because probability sampling provides equal access to all members of the target population and many of them may not hold equal amount of knowledge regarding the research context.
In order to comply with the ethical ground, the researcher will ensure that before performing the study, a consent letter is received from University Authority. The researcher will ensure that no respondent should be forced to take part in the study. The participants hold the right to withdraw their participation at any moment. The researcher ensures that confidentiality of data and anonymity of the participants will adequately be maintained. In addition to this, the researcher ensures that the collected data will only be used for the academic purpose and the data will not be shared with any other external parties.
As the study will be performed considering a government authority in UAE, there is risk of presentation of data because improper or inaccurate data can create negative image of the authority. The researcher ensures that the reliability and validity of the data will be checked before using it into the study. In addition, the sampling frame chosen is restricted to a small number; hence, the concern is that the limited number of respondents might not provide the desired result from the study.
References
Azadnia, A.H., Saman, M.Z.M. and Wong, K.Y., 2015. Sustainable supplier selection and order lot-sizing: an integrated multi-objective decision-making process. International Journal of Production Research, 53(2), pp.383-408.
Collett, N., Pandit, N.R. and Saarikko, J., 2014. Success and failure in turnaround attempts. An analysis of SMEs within the Finnish Restructuring of Enterprises Act. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 26(1-2), pp.123-141.
Collett, N., Pandit, N.R. and Saarikko, J., 2014. Success and failure in turnaround attempts. An analysis of SMEs within the Finnish Restructuring of Enterprises Act. Entrepreneurship & Regional Development, 26(1-2), pp.123-141.
Huffman, J.B., Hipp, K.A., Pankake, A.M. and Moller, G.A.Y.L.E., 2014. Professional learning communities: Leadership, purposeful decision making, and job-embedded staff development. Journal of School Leadership, 11(5), pp.448-463.
Lewis, S., 2015. Qualitative inquiry and research design: Choosing among five approaches. Health promotion practice, 16(4), pp.473-475.
Ngah, R., Tai, T. and Bontis, N., 2016. Knowledge management capabilities and organizational performance in roads and transport authority of Dubai: The mediating role of learning organization. Knowledge and Process Management, 23(3), pp.184-193.
O’Kane, C. and Cunningham, J., 2014. Turnaround leadership core tensions during the company turnaround process. European Management Journal, 32(6), pp.963-980.
Pan, W.H. and Chen, Y.L., 2014. A case study of the corporate turnaround strategies. International Journal of Organizational Innovation (Online), 7(2), p.63.
Petersen, J.A., Kushwaha, T. and Kumar, V., 2015. Marketing communication strategies and consumer financial decision making: The role of national culture. Journal of Marketing, 79(1), pp.44-63.
Robinson, O.C., 2014. Sampling in interview-based qualitative research: A theoretical and practical guide. Qualitative research in psychology, 11(1), pp.25-41.
Shepherd, N.G. and Rudd, J.M., 2014. The influence of context on the strategic decision?making process: A review of the literature. International Journal of Management Reviews, 16(3), pp.340-364.
Tangpong, C., Abebe, M. and Li, Z., 2015. A temporal approach to retrenchment and successful turnaround in declining firms. Journal of Management Studies, 52(5), pp.647-677.
Taylor, S.J., Bogdan, R. and DeVault, M., 2015. Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource. John Wiley & Sons.
Waas, T., Hugé, J., Block, T., Wright, T., Benitez-Capistros, F. and Verbruggen, A., 2014. Sustainability assessment and indicators: Tools in a decision-making strategy for sustainable development. Sustainability, 6(9), pp.5512-5534.
Walsh, G.S. and Cunningham, J.A., 2016. Business failure and entrepreneurship: Emergence, evolution and future research. Foundations and Trends® in Entrepreneurship, 12(3), pp.163-285.
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