Types Of Organizational Strategies In Management

Are you ready to enhance your management outcomes with a strong understanding of your company’s organizational strategy? If so, you’re in the perfect place.

In this blog, we’ll explore the different types of organizational strategies in management and examine how they can help your business achieve steady, sustainable success. Then, we’ll break down the various levels of organizational strategies, including: 

• Corporate
• Competitive
• Business
• Functional 
• Operational

Plus, we’ll provide real-world examples of how these strategies can be implemented!

A strong understanding of organizational strategy is critical for supporting long-term growth and success. So whether you’re a C-suite executive, department head, manager, or business owner, read on to discover the five most important organizational strategies in management. 

The Importance of Organizational Strategy

One of the key distinctions between businesses that see steady growth and those that find it difficult to break even is a solid, data-driven organizational strategy. Without a distinct and well-defined strategy, a business can easily lose focus and struggle to accomplish its long-term objectives.

A solid organizational strategy outlines a company’s vision, mission, values, and goals and serves as a roadmap for its operations. Organizational strategies also lay the groundwork for developing strategies and action plans for how a business will pursue and accomplish the identified goals. 

Businesses with robust organizational strategies can improve performance and increase return on investment by defining important priorities and allocating resources accordingly. The reliable framework provided by an organizational strategy also makes it easy to evolve and adapt facets of your operations in response to shifting market conditions and consumer preferences. 

In short, a carefully crafted, data-backed organizational strategy is vital for companies and managers alike that want a reliable, replicable way to bring long-term aspirations and missions within reach. The right organizational strategy provides a shared sense of direction that unites every aspect of your business. 

What Are the Types of Organizational Strategies?

Competitive Strategy

Competitive strategy outlines companies’ approach to gaining a competitive advantage over their rivals in specific arenas.

Competitive strategy revolves around identifying a company’s unique strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (also known as SWOT) to uncover a route to increased market share, a growing customer base, and higher sales. 

A great example of a competitive organizational strategy is the adoption of a focus strategy. Focus strategies prioritize “niching down” within a subsection of a larger market to capture a smaller, but highly valuable, consumer demographic. 

Companies pursuing a focus-based competitive strategy will refine their offerings to appeal to a particular subset of the larger customer base. This serves dual purposes: first, it allows the company to eliminate a large portion of its competition by providing a more refined solution. Secondly, it allows the company to capture a dedicated pool of customers that can be more easily won over than the total market. 

Corporate Level Strategy

Corporate-level strategies are “big-picture” plans that provide a framework for managing business units, allocating resources, optimizing operations, and identifying and pursuing growth opportunities. 

Corporate-level strategies differ from competitive strategies by focusing on the entire organization’s overall direction and scope rather than just one aspect. They are concerned with the organization’s long-term health as a whole, ensuring that the company remains competitive and sustainable in the long run.

Examples of corporate-level strategies include vertical integration, diversification, mergers and acquisitions, and divestment. These strategies are designed to manage multiple business units and allocate resources in a way that supports the company’s long-term objectives.

Business Level Strategy

Business-level organizational strategies are designed to create a framework of systems, processes, and policies that enable companies to leverage their competitive advantages effectively. 

These strategies aim to operationalize the plans and initiatives identified by higher-level organizational strategies and turn them into actionable steps that can be implemented throughout the organization. By creating a clear and coherent plan of action, businesses can gain a competitive edge in their specific market or industry and achieve their long-term goals.

These action plans can include initiatives like adjusting product and service pricing, retargeting ideal customer demographics, and updating marketing campaigns to support your company’s long-term goals and vision.

Unlike corporate-level strategies that focus on big-picture questions like resource allocations and mergers, business-level strategies answer questions like:

• How can we differentiate our products or services?
• How can we cut expenses and streamline production to maintain a cost advantage over competitors?
• How can we create a unique and engaging value proposition that appeals to customers we haven’t captured previously?

Functional Level Strategy

Functional-level strategies dictate how individual departments within a business will contribute to achieving goals, initiatives, and missions identified by higher-tier organizational strategies.

Unlike other types of organizational strategy, functional-level strategies prioritize action over theory. This means implementing a functional-level strategy would involve steps like:

• Tailoring your marketing department’s priorities to support the creation of new and improved sales collateral. 
• Introducing a new analysis tool to your financial department that makes tracking KPIs quicker and more convenient than ever.
• Encouraging your HR department to refine talent searches to capture candidates that will support your new initiatives.
• Training your sales department on a new script that promotes products. 

Each departmental strategy must align with the overall organizational strategy to achieve the company’s objectives. Effective communication and coordination between departments are crucial in implementing functional-level strategies. 

Functional-level strategy hinges on closely aligning with the goals at every stratum of your company. That can take on many forms, but most often includes initiatives like: 

• Cutting expenses
• Expanding into new markets
• Supporting industry-leading customer service
• Creating new and improved products and services
• Or targeting new consumer personas or demographics

Operational Level Strategy

Operating-level strategies are all about implementing organizational strategies and dictating how rolling-out new policies, initiatives, and decision-making guidelines will unfold. 

The best operating-level strategies provide smooth, streamlined outlines for updates or changes to central operation activities like:

• Supply chain management
• Inventory control
• Quality control
• Project management
• Production planning

A carefully crafted and effectively implemented operating-level strategy provides a convenient and communicable launchpad for meeting sales targets, improving customer experiences, streamlining research, development, and production, and managing costs as efficiently as possible. 

What Are Examples of Organizational Strategy in Management?

For the best odds of success, organizational strategies should always be customized to your company’s unique strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. However, there are a few examples of organizational strategy that can be applied across industries and markets. 

Let’s explore three of them now!

1. Cost leadership strategy: Cost leadership strategies aim to eliminate or reduce costs at every opportunity to position a company as having the cheapest product or service option on the market. Common cost mitigation tactics include streamlining operations, minimizing waste, and ensuring you receive the best deals from vendors and suppliers. 
2. Differentiation strategy: Differentiation strategies aim to capture market share and drive sales by standing out from competitors by using unique products, services, and customer experiences. Common routes to achieving differentiation include:

• Updating or improving popular products.
• Providing top-notch customer service.
• Upgrading their offerings with innovative features.

3. Diversification strategy: Diversification strategies aim to maximize sales and minimize risk by expanding into new industries and markets. Diversification hinges on the idea of not putting too many eggs in a single basket, making it one of the most appealing organizational strategies for businesses interested in laying a foundation for long-term, multi-faceted success. 

What Are Organizational Patterns?

An organizational pattern is a systematic approach to arranging and structuring your ideas, thoughts, and presentations to generate the most significant impact. 

Organizational patterns are valuable tools for managers and team members alike who want to build strong connections, encourage open communication, and promote logical problem-solving. 

The effective use of organizational patterns helps make essential business information more understandable and digestible by a wide range of audiences. Using organizational patterns to provide clear structure and direction to your team empowers managers to generate stronger business outcomes. 

How Medallion Partners Stand Out in Executive Search

Don’t let the challenge of finding and retaining top talent hold your organization back. Medallion Partners is here to help you take your business to the next level with world-class candidates and bespoke organizational strategies that empower your business to edge out the competition.

Our team of top-notch search and organizational strategy consultants brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to every project we take on, ensuring companies like yours achieve sustainable growth and success.

From premium executive search services to comprehensive organizational strategy consulting, we have the expertise and track record of success you need to make your three-year goals next year’s reality. 

So why wait? Let us help you attract and retain top talent while crafting a winning organizational strategy. Contact us today to learn more and start your journey toward success.