ABSTRACT
The achievement strategic goals are one of the challenges faced by many organizations, including the Export Development Bank of Iran. For strengthening the financial and intellectual capitals of EDBI, appropriate strategies should be selected. Based on cognitive school of designing strategy, the belief system of organizational staff affected its strategies. One way to discover appropriate strategies in organization are studying, employees perceptions of strategic themes. The purpose of this study was to understand the dominate concourse (different ideas) of important strategic themes along the Export Development Bank of Iran. Researcher identified the 43 most important statements concerning the diversity of opinion within the present concourse. The statements of this concourse are organized in four main categories: 1) finance, 2) customer, 3) structure and 4) human resource dimensions. This categorization is based on intellectual and financial capital in organization.
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DOI: 10.3923/rjbm.2011.125.129
URL: https://scialert.net/abstract/?doi=rjbm.2011.125.129
INTRODUCTION
Strategic themes are the main, high-level business strategies that form the basis for the organizations business model. They are part of the strategic planning work of building a balanced scorecard. Once you have agreed upon the vision for your organization (your picture of the future or desired future state), then we systematically decompose that vision into 3-4 strategic themes. We sometimes refer to themes as pillars of excellence. The strategic themes are very broad in scope. They apply to every part of the organization and define what major strategic thrusts the organization will pursue to achieve its vision. Themes affect all four of the balanced scorecard perspectives (financial, customer, internal process, organizational capacity). A strategic theme is an area in which your organization must excel in order to achieve your vision (Perry, 2000).
This study attempted to understand the strategic themes through the eyes of staff and administrators of EDBI.
This study presents research aimed at uncovering and documenting the diversity strategic themes has been used in managing bank. It is based on data collected from 30 staff of bank and other documents.
Literature review
School of thought on strategic planning: There are strategic approaches or viewpoints that take on thematic interpretations. For instance, Mintzberg describes the Cognitive School as one which focuses on mental or deliberative processes. In the case of the Entrepreneurial School of strategic planning, the mainstay is a strong person with a compelling vision of the future. The Learning School places emphasis on collective or group-think. The other schools of thought regarding strategy formation and their accompanying thematic views or processes include: Political = Power; Cultural = Ideological; Environmental = Passive (Young, 2002). This research has been down based on Cognitive school (Table 1).
The capital of organization: The capital of organization is dividing into two groups, financial and intellectual capitals. Scholars have generally identified three main dimensions of IC that include human capital, structural capital and relational capital. Human capital represents the individual knowledge stock of an organization as represented by its employees (Bontis and Fitz-Enz, 2002).
Employees generate IC through their components of employees work (Ross et al., 2005). Structural capital consists of mechanisms and organizational procedures which support the employees in completing their tasks and includes all non-human storehouses of knowledge in organizations like databases, process manuals, routines, strategies and anything whose value to the company is higher than its material value. Relational capital is associated with the network of relations that the organization and its members are able to establish both inside and outside the working environment. The resources that emerge, that are transferred and are made co-natural with these multifarious relations constitute the relational capital of the organization (Adler and Kwon, 2002).
Concourse theory: Concourse is the breadth of debate around a particular issue (Jeffares and Skelcher, 2009). The concourse is a technical concept (not to be confused with the concept of discourse) much used in Q methodology for the collection of all the possible statements the respondents can make about the subject at hand (Van Exel and Graaf, 2005). Brown (1991) argues that the concourse is the very stuff of life, from the playful banter of lovers or friends to the heady discussions of philosophers and scientists to the private thoughts found in dreams and diaries. From concourse, new meanings arise, bright ideas are hatched and discoveries are made. It is the wellspring of creativity and identity formation in individuals, groups, organizations and nations. A concourse regarding the role of a social worker may consist of different statements expressing opinions and views about, for example what social workers do and how they work. The concourse may include perspectives from clients and social workers. Many social work clients have a variety of different experiences.
Table 1: | School of thought on strategic planning |
How they perceive their contact with social services might be a part of a defined concourse. However, individuals who have no knowledge of, for example, the role of a social worker will have difficulties communicating about the topic because they are unfamiliar with the concourse. The ability to communicate and share understanding of a topic is linked to the persons knowledge, experience and interest in the topic at hand. In general, an individuals point of view about a topic may be recognizable or understandable to others within the same group or culture even though they may not share the same view.
The concourse is rooted in knowledge (or communication) of which all in the group are aware (Ellingsen et al., 2010). A concourse can be obtained in a number of ways, including interviews, participant observation and popular literature such as media reports, newspapers, magazines, novels and scientific literature (papers, essays and books) (Van Exel and Graaf, 2005). The concourse is represented as a series of short statements. These could number in the hundreds. Where possible, the statements should be direct quotes from interviewees so that the manner in which they express their opinions is captured.
However, this is not always possible. Alternatively, they may come from published sources or reconstructions from the researchers (Jeffares and Skelcher, 2009). According to Zafonte and Sabatier, Policy elites have well integrated policy belief systems that affect their perceptions of the severity and causes of policy problems and perceptions of the proper approaches to be used in addressing these problems (Kim and Roh, 2008). The concourse among government elite members has been studied several times in the public administration literature. For example, Selden et al. (1999) studied concourse among practitioners and scholars on bureaucratic responsibility, roles and values. They compiled 135 statements from 75 personal interviews, 6 focus groups with public sector employees and numerous articles and books. They divided these statements into five groups: Managerial efficiency, political responsiveness, neutrality, proactive administration and social equity.
Fang (2006) investigated concourse about fiscal decentralization in Taiwan. He collected 160 statements from literature published by Taiwanese scholars from 1990-2002. He then selected 40 statements from them as concourse about fiscal decentralization.
Jeffares and Skelcher (2009) argued that network forms of governance offer public managers considerable flexibility in shaping the way that they engage with citizens, civil society organizations and other actors on matters of public policy and services. They studied public managers' views in England and the Netherlands about this relationship. They developed their concourse of over 300 statements from interview data collected in this and previous research projects and the academic literature on governance networks and democracy.
However, although studies of the kind just outlined have established concourse among administrators and other members of governing elites, there is no literature about how administrators perceive the best strategic themes for achieving strategic goals. The present study seeks to fill this gap in the literature.
Collecting the concourse: Present concourse about strategic themes was extracted from interviews with experts in this field and from a review of documents and reports and the bank website and from a dialogue forum that was made in EDBI website. At first, 90 short statements or phrases were collected from the above-mentioned sources. These phrases stem directly or indirectly from quotes relating to strategic themes in EDBI.
Table 2: | The dominant concourse |
From these, 44 statements were selected. Selection favored those statements that were more comprehensive, less repetitive, and representative of different views. These statements were divided into four main groups as an inductive model: 1 finance, 2 customer 3 structure and 4) human resource (Table 2).
CONCLUSION
This is a study of subjectivity. The purpose of this study is the investigation of EDBI administrator's perceptions about strategic themes in EDBI. Unlike other studies that are devoted to finding the best strategic themes for organization, this study attempted to understand the themes through the eyes of staff. Therefore, it studied the present concourse about strategic themes for achieving organizational goals. Different views in the concourse were divided into four main groups: 1) Finance, 2) customer 3) structure and 4) human resource dimensions. The statements in the finance category indicate the techniques for management the financial capital, but three other categories show the different strategic themes about intellectual capital in bank. The results of this study show bank could get different strategic goals for managing its capital. These differentiation stem from administrators' beliefs of strategic themes in bank. All of data in this research have been gathered at EDBI, future studies can study concourse at other bank and attain different category.
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