Conclusion and implications
We seek to assess the nature of the moderation effect of organizational leadership on the relationship between firms’ strategy and organizational development. The study argues that in Africa and for that matter Ghana, where power distance is high (Hofstede et al., 1997), organizational leadership provides the needed incentive for strategies such as innovation to achieve firm performance enhancement. We posit that organizational leadership does not only serve as predictor of strategy formulation but provides the needed strategic fit for strategy implementation to achieve organizational development in the form of firm performance enhancement. The institutional structures of high power distance cultures should therefore guide leaders of organizations to cultivate a strategic fit between firms’ strategic orientation and the business environment to improve on the firm performance.
The results from this study have significant theoretical and managerial implications for organizational development in Africa. Our results show that both innovation as a strategy and organizational leadership impact on organizational development in terms of financial and non-financial performance. The implications for these findings are that firms in Africa and specifically in Ghana’s services sector can improve on their financial and non-financial performance by investing in product innovations. The positive relationship found between innovation and performance is akin to previous studies (e.g. Anning-Dorson, et al., 2015; Gronum, et al., 2012; Crossan and Apaydin, 2010). By extension, African firms may seek performance improvement through differentiating their products from the competition, by going for first mover advantage from their new products and constantly introducing new services in their market of operations.
