A thesis submitted to the
Graduate School of Business Administration,
University of Witwatersrand,
in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Johannesburg 1991 / The purpose of this thesis were to investigate the
effective strategic options aVailable to professional
service orgtanizations in the face of the challenging and
changing south African environment.
Since these organizations are viewed as integrated
archetypes of organizational form, strategy and the
personal Characteristics, perceptions and values of their
top management, they were researched from this
perspective.
The professions are also viewed as progressing along a
continuum of industrialzation, as theoretically defined,
and the progress of the organizations along this route
was examined to establish their position as a predictor
of possible future trends.A model of the effectiveness
of professtional service organizations in the face of the
environmental challenges is also tested.
The research was conducted with the assistance of the
partners and clients of 56 prominent organizations from
six professions in south Africa, covering three different
industrial sectors, the commercial sector, the building
and construction sector and the health care sector.
Theory indicated certaint possible adaptive options
aVailable to organizations in general, but due to the
lack of speCific theoretically researched models for
professional organizations, an inductive approach was
taken to the research problem. In this way, the research
findings would dictate the eventual correspondence to the
theory. Multiple operationalism was used as a
research approach in different stages of the research
process, as was triangulation of research methods to
arrive at the research results.
The findings indicate that there are five groups of
professional organizations representing different
configurations of adaptation to the South African
environmental circumstances. Using the model developed
in the research to measure organizational effectiveness,
it was found that three of these groups appear to be
effective, while the other two are less effective. Some
of the attributes of these five groups were contingent
on the type of industry and the type of profession. The
profiles of the partners provided a particularly fertile
area of theory development and a number of propositions
were generated which can be tested in future research.
It was concluded that an integrated typology Of five
groups of strategy, organization and the profile of the
top management team did exist and that three of the
options proved to be more effective that the other two.
Further guidelines for the management of professional
organizations, included the examination of the
consequences of co-operative strategies, particularly in
the light of a possible increase in consolidation within
the industries, are given.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:wits/oai:wiredspace.wits.ac.za:10539/20882 |
| Date | 17 August 2016 |
| Creators | Botha, Faith Elizabeth |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf, application/pdf |
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