Relationship between Strategic Leadership & Cooperative Strategy: The Moderating Role of Clan Culture. (A Case of Small and Medium Sector Organizations of Pakistan)

Abstract

Organizational culture has attracted a great interest by theorists and researchers since many years. Leadership in organizations have emphasized on the internal culture strengths and ways to improve the efficiency by incorporating various strategies. Cooperative strategy is being associated with internal strengths and relationship and has been a primary focus area in large organizations with ample opportunity for innovation. Small and medium enterprises however, struggled with innovation and competitiveness. To foster growth, strategic leadership stressed to adopt cooperative strategies and cooperative environment. The current study attempts to reveal the underlying mechanism through which the strategic leadership can improve organizational performance through clan culture and cooperative strategies. Based on the Competing value framework and Resource based view of the firms, This research model was selected and analyzed. Clan culture is used as a moderator variable. The model explores the local Pakistani business leadership strategies in family run businesses as well as small and medium enterprises. Strategic leadership is taken as independent variable while cooperative strategy as dependent variable, Clan culture moderates the relationship between the strategic leadership and cooperative strategies. Resource based view provides a framework to analyze the role of firms tangible and intangible resources to achieve competitive advantage. Data was collected from 294 respondents through survey method. All questionnaires were personally administered. AMOS was used to test the moderated model. The moderated relationship among strategic leadership, clan culture and cooperative strategy resulted significant. Clan culture moderated relationship between Strategic leadership & cooperative strategy. This study contributes towards the enhanced application of clan culture and cooperative environment in the small and medium sized organizations as well as family owned businesses. To combat competition from larger organizations and substitute products, cooperative strategy can be very effective. Keywords: Strategic Leadership, Organizational Culture, Clan Culture, Cooperative Strategy, SME.