The Role of Strategic Leadership in Organizational Development
Keywords:
Strategic Leadership, Organizational Development, StrategicAbstract
The widely admissible phrase that everything rises and falls on leadership is true of every entity, but more attention today should be given to how strategic is that leadership. While leadership may be generic, drawing a distinction between ordinary leadership and strategic leadership may just prove to be the difference between high impact organizations and stagnant ones. Theories in contemporary literature regarding strategic leadership support the idea that strategic leadership has a significant impact on the decision-making process and thus facilitates the organization to implement effective strategies designed for optimum performance. The main purpose of this paper is to examine strategic leadership, with a focus on implementing strategy for organizational development. It builds upon the understanding of how strategic leadership becomes the process of transforming organizations into a successful firm through the high level and timely strategies. The study was conducted by means of a qualitative mode of inquiry using informant and in-depth interviews directed purposely to the lower and middle management levels of leadership as well as those closest to the leader in their organization. The study finds that strategic leaders contribute to organizational development through the input of capacity, dynamism, effectiveness, management abilities and problem solving. These are applied to the environment in which organization operates and constantly develops strategies for each situation. The study also confirms that strategic leaders are builders of organizations, and that strategic leadership is oriented towards assimilation of workable and timely tested strategies and are designed to overcome organizational limitations. Both leaders and firms will have to recognize and learn from the fundamentals of strategic leadership.
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