What is strategic change?

Strategic Change:

Strategic Change means changing the organizational Vision, Mission, Objectives and ofcourse the adopted strategy to achieve those objectives.Strategic change is defined as " changes in the content of a firm's strategy as defined by its scope, resource deployments, competitive advantages, and synergy"(Hofer and Schendel 1978)Strategic change is defined as a difference in the form, qualiity, or state over time in organization's alignment with its external environment (Rajagopalan & Spreitzer, 1997 Van de Ven & Pool, 1995).

Considering the definition of strategic change, strategic change could be affected by the states of firms and their external environments. Because the performance of firms might dependent on the fit between firms and their external environments, the appearances of novel opportunities and threats in the external environments, in other Words, the change of external environments, require firms to adapt to the external environments again; as a result, firms would change their strategy in response to the environmental changes. The states of firms will also affect the occurrence of strategic change. For example, firms tend to adopt new strategies in the face of financial distress for the purpose of breaking the critical situations. Additionally, organizations would possess structural inertia that they tend to keep their previous structure and strategy (Hannan & Freeman, 1984).

However, the former research on strategic change has not shown expected empirical results. To explain the unexpected empirical results, Rajagopalan and Spreitzer (1997)suggests that the external environment could not be constantly decided; it would be decided depending on the decision maker's cognition of external environment. Therefore, the occurrence of strategic change would be related to their cognition of external environment.

Based on the argument of Rajagopalan and Spreitzer (1997), the factors which affect decision maker's cognition of external environment would affect strategic change.