Hyper-competition, constantly evolving customer needs, accompanied with the accelerating unpredictability of environmental change have created a competitive landscape where marketing organizations have to constantly make strategic changes to survive and prosper over the long run. Recent disruptive events such as the outbreak of Covid-19 have reinforced the need to be constantly ready for change. However, existing literature lacks a robust measure for capturing the organizational capabilities and underlying mechanisms required to achieve marketing-related strategic changes effectively. The current PhD project addresses this gap by developing a measurement tool for Strategic Change Capability (SCC). Based on interviews with senior marketing managers and business consultants, SCC is conceptualized as a multi-dimensional dynamic marketing capability that reflects a firm's ability to enact marketing-related strategic changes for managing its competitive standing in light of new threats and opportunities, by establishing a business case for change, preparing employees for accepting change, setting up the organization for implementing change, institutionalizing behaviors that support change implementation, and using feedback mechanisms to monitor and amend change plans when needed. Following rigorous scale development and validation procedures - including (a) item generation, (b) expert evaluation, (c) scale purification, (d) scale validity, (e) nomological and predictive validity, and (f) scale generalizability studies - a psychometrically sound and reliable measure of SCC is developed. The current study contributes to the dynamic capabilities theory and provides guidance on how managers can enhance marketing organizations' ability to perform effective strategic changes in dynamic business environments.
CONCEPTUALIZING AND MEASURING THE STRATEGIC CHANGE CAPABILITY OF MARKETING ORGANIZATIONS
Bekos, G. (Author). 6 Jan 2025
Student thesis: Phd