Why do product-market strategies fail? A sociostructural examination under conditions of adherence

The authors contend that structural and managerial antecedents of strategy failure exist and the extent to which these determine failure is different under conditions of high and low adherence to strategy. Our results support these arguments and demonstrate that the drivers of failure differ according to the unusual strategy process environment of both types of firms. Resource scarcity is found to be a common antecedent to strategy failure in organizations regardless of adherence. From there, managerial conditions (symbolic information use, strategy championing, and tenure) drive strategy failure in high-adherence firms. However, only structural conditions (formalization and resource scarcity) are antecedents of strategy failure in low-adherence firms, while failure is mitigated by centralized decision making.