Date of Graduation

5-1992

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (PhD)

Degree Level

Graduate

Department

Management

Advisor/Mentor

Todd, John T.

Committee Member

Rao, Chatrathi P.

Second Committee Member

Taylor, Lewis A. III

Keywords

Religion and theology; Philosophy; Social sciences

Abstract

The implications of strategy, environmental uncertainty, and leader attributes to the performance of organizations have been the subject of many research studies. The traditional interaction-based contingency approach that has typically been used in the management literature for examining the interrelationships between these variables, may very often be inadequate to capture the overall pattern of fit among them. A contemporary approach that allows researchers to examine sophisticated relationships between variables is configuration or systems theory— which suggests that inevitable relationships exist between strategic, environmental, contextual, and organizational variables and performance. This study used both the interaction and configuration-based approaches to determine the performance implications of the contingencies and congruencies between strategy and leader attributes in an uncertain environment.

A review of the literature— the basis for the formulation of the three contingency and one configuration-based hypotheses— on generic strategies, environmental uncertainty, and the relevant leader attributes was undertaken. From the generic strategies literature review, a conceptual synthesis of previous classification schemes was used to develop a set of attributes that was then used to measure the extent to which organizational leaders pursued the characteristics of different types of strategies. The measures for strategy and all the other variables/constructs were designed in the form of a questionnaire that was sent to the senior ministers of selected Arkansas Southern Baptist churches. Sampling from a religious institution is yet another contribution of this study, in that it adds to the limited number of studies that have investigated the management of these important but scientifically unexplored organizations.

The collected data was analyzed in order to test the research hypotheses. The results indicate that the variables in this study may have important performance implications. Furthermore, the findings support the call by previous researchers for using multiple approaches to examine the fit between organizational and contextual variables. Finally, the implications of the results of this study for contingency and configuration-based research and the strategic management field in general were also discussed.

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