Expanded Summary

Competitive approaches are normally seen as a set of actions of available resources that are usually utilized in the strategic process development. Therefore, managers pay important attention to them to increase organizational performance.The relationship between competitive approaches (low-cost leadership, differentiation and focus) and the organizational performance have been explored by many strategy researches, yet, there is no clear evidence that companies following one of the generic strategies are going to have superior performance. Although, most research in this area has been conducted in the manufacturing sector, the review of the literature on strategy processes and organizational performance pinpointed that there is no single empirical evidence involving Georgian based manufacturing organizations. Moreover, the degree of strategy implementation has not been measured against the performance measures of the companies.

Strategy Implementation and Performance -Although there's significant theoretical and or empirical literature available on strategy process, its implementation has not yet been studied widely enough. Strategy implementation is the most important link between a strategy formulation and a firm’s performance. Nutt has conducted a research studying on both the U.S. and Canadian organizations. He came to conclusion that not even half of these organizations have fulfilled their goals because of the mistakes in the implementation process.

Hickson, et al., (2003) identified several influential factors on strategy implementation process and classified them into two groups. The first group factors are based on experience and include: acceptability, resourcing, familiarity and specificity.  The second group factors are based on readiness and include: structural facilitation, priority and receptivity. According to authors, companies have only two options in successfully implementing the strategy. One is planned option and the other is prioritized option. Despite adopting either of aforementioned approaches in the process of strategy implementation will make company’s results better off,   Hickson, et al., (2003)based on their research findings have concluded that those companies choosing to employ integrated approach have better results in their performances.

Performance Measures -The majority of studies use a variety of measures, such as non-financial (success) or financial. Financial measure comprise with such indicator as: profit, turnover, return on investment, return on capital employed, and inventory turnover. Non-financial measures include innovation and market standing.

The measures in the success of firm's performance generally include the bottom-line and financial indicators such as sales, profits, cash flow, return on equity, and growth. These factors are important to determine how a firm compares with its industry competitors when assessing firm performance. With the multitude of competitive environments faced by firms in differing industries, knowing only absolute financial numbers such as sales, profits, and or cash flow is not very illuminating unless viewed in the context of how well the firm is doing compared to their competition. Therefore, it is important to use an industry comparison approach when making firm performance assessments for organizations sampled from a wide variety of industries.

This research is going to adopt the two types of performance measures (objective achievement and competitive performance, including financial performance measures like: return on assets return on equity, return on sales end etc.) used by many researchers in different combinations.

Research Strategy - The following research undertook a quantitative strategy through a deduction approach. Hypotheses were formulated from the existing knowledge and tested using the primary data collected from administering the questionnaire. A random sample of the manufacturing organizations was selected for this study and the findings were generalized. The hypothesized relationships between the variables were tested using appropriate statistical techniques in order to assess and model the relationships.

Survey Instrument -The questionnaire was constructed to investigate the relationship between strategy implementation and the organizational performance. Already existing measures were modified and employed to test the hypotheses mentioned in this article. The questionnaire was distributed accordingly and responses were collected through an internet survey tool.

The chef aim of this study was to investigate Georgian based manufacturing organizations in the context of strategy implementation and performance. On the one hand, the research looked at the procedures of strategy implementation within the manufacturing organizations, and checked whether or not mentioned processes had an impact on the companies’ overall performance.

The purpose of this study is to examine the links between strategy implementation and organizational performance. Moreover, this paper will attempt to find whether or not the emphasis on planning strategy implementation will grant a company with superior performance.This paper studied 108 Georgian based manufacturing companies. A questionnaire was chosen as the survey instrument. The respondents selected were CEOs of manufacturing companies being surveyed. Findings of this study are based on the results of the hypothesis test which indicate that there is not a strong link between the degree of planning strategy implementation and organizational performance. The results of this study are particularly useful for practitioners, as it can provide managers with the information connected with strategy formulation and implementation processes. This study makes a contribution to the existing literature by exploring strategy processes within Georgian based manufacturing companies, and addressing inconclusiveness of the results of generic strategies and organizational performance.

Keywords – Strategy, strategic management, business strategy, strategy implementation.