Strategic Responses to Environmental Turbulence

To succeed in an industry an organization must select a mode of strategic behaviour which matches the levels of environmental turbulence, and develop a resource capability which complements the chosen mode. Investigates UK building societies and identifies three distinct modes of strategic behaviour. One group of societies are reactive and driven by their environment. A second group are pre‐emptive and seek to anticipate future events and prepare for them while the third group exhibit the most aggressive stance; not only do they seek to identify future scenarios, they actually work to bring these about. The groups are compared across a range of marketing and strategy variables to establish the extent to which these approaches are supportive of the selected mode of behaviour. Clear differences are apparent between the reactive and proactive groups although, surprisingly, few differences of substance are evident between the two proactive groups.