How to Align Employee Targets to the Strategy

By Tawia Tsekumah

This book is the end product of an independent research carried out by the author on business management within various organisations. The study comprise analysing methods of employee alignment to the business strategy. The book’s strength lies in its high degree of synthesis of scholarly articles from highly reputable global business journals coupled with rich and robust primary data analysis, discussions and findings related to the problem of business strategy and employee targets misalignment. The use of diagrams aids the readers understanding considerably. The methodology is excellent and extremely well developed. The findings are extremely rich and the resultant analysis strong. The conclusions are sensible and the limitations highlighted appropriately. Almost every organisation faces misalignment in its evolution but if promptly corrected could increase efficiency in business processes thus contributing to sustained competitive advantage and long term profitability

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387884285

Book preview

How to Align Employee Targets to the Strategy

HOW TO ALIGN EMPLOYEE TARGETS TO THE STRATEGY

Tawia Tsekumah

©2017. Tawia Tsekumah. All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealings for the purposes of research, private study, criticism or review, no part of this publication may be adapted, reproduced, utilized in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical including printing, photocopying, recording or by any information retrieval system without the prior written permission of the author.

ABSTRACT

Organisations aim at profitability by bringing or creating order in a risky environment to their advantage. As a result every business organisation operates a business model. But once an organisation succeeds in profitability and growth competitors inevitably try to replicate the business model. This is where strategy is needed. Strategy is dynamic; the more bespoke the strategy the more difficult it will be to replicate and therefore the better placed the organisation’s competitive advantage.

Strategy tells the organisation what to do, how to do it and when, in order to keep advancing.  Strategy needs human vehicles – these are employees. Without employees no strategy can be executed. Many companies continue to motivate their employees to work harder but sometimes such efforts are not reflected at the overall strategic level and are therefore wasted. Employees may have achieved or exceeded their targets and may be rightfully entitled to bonuses but the company may still be struggling to make profits or achieve its strategic goals. How could one explain that? Why are investors and shareholders making losses whilst employees are meeting performance targets?

This research report investigates the key causes of business strategy – employee misalignment in retail banks or financial institutions and insurance agencies. It analyses the current methods used for appraisals and identifies standard industry practices in employee performance evaluation and alignment to the business strategy. It also analyses the role of senior and line managers in the cascading of strategy to the employees. The end product is a model or framework that informs better alignment to the business strategy and long term goals.

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1.1 Conventional Cascading of Strategy Within an Organisation

Figure 2.1 Relationships in the Balanced Score Card.     (Martinsons et al., 1999)

Figure 2.2 Management Concepts Matrix

Figure 2.3 Scope of Authority in Centralized and Decentralized Organisations (Arias et al.,2010)

Figure 2.5 Management By Objectives (MBO)               (Drucker,1954)

Figure 2.6 From Mission, Vision and Strategy to Employee Targets and Assessment

Figure 2.7 Misaligned and Aligned Objectives

Figure 4.2 Structuring the Data                      (Corley and Gioia, 2014)

Figure 6.1 Strategy – Employee Alignment Construct Leading to Targets Alignment Board

Figure 6.2 Targets Alignment Board

Figure 6.3 Alignment Model Use Case

LIST OF TABLES

Table 2.4 Advantages of Centralization and Decentralization     (Arias et al.,2010)

Table 3.1 Differences between Quantitative and Qualitative Research (Bryman and Bell, 2011)

Table 3.2 Details of Data Collected

Table 3.3 Key Figures from Data Analysis (KPIs)

Table 4.1 Preliminary Analysis to Find Patterns and Insights in the Data

Table 5.2 Analysing Business Perspectives Using CATWOE Framework   (Checkland, 1985)

Table 6.4 Revisiting Aims and objectives

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS