The Nexus Between Strategic Decision-Making, Strategic Communication and Organizational Performance: A Critical Literature Review

Abstract

Strategic decisions are long term, highly unstructured, complex, inherently risky, and have a great impact on the future of the organization. Strategic decisions are those important decisions that typically require a vast number of organizational resources, and consideration of the firm’s environment consideration. Decision-making is so important that none of the managerial functions can be performed without it. Decisions influence organizational direction, administration, and structure. Decisions can be costly or beneficial depending on the approach of the decision-making process, the quality of the decisions made. In this regard, strategic decision- making should be well communicated. In an organic company with a stated focus on the people who make it up, its flexibility allows important information to arrive in necessary doses, impacting daily decisions and in the organization itself, with no conflicting messages to the market and simplifying the process of an implementation strategy. Communication holds several fences to implementing a strategy in a company. The strategies of communication are created when there is a crisis or a major event clearly requiring communication issues to be resolved. Most companies understand and appreciate the importance of creating strategic plans to drive decision making over the long term. Strategic and proper communication gives a channeling on how to deal with upheavals such as major changes in the company or organization, layoffs and downsizing, and technological change. The idea is that the companies cannot organize organizational resources without knowing where the organization wants to be and how it will get there, hence effective communication is a key factor to consider. This paper sought to establish the relationship between strategic decision making, the organizational performance and the role of strategic communication on the relationship. The paper adopted a qualitative research design and used secondary data. A critique on previous studies done by scholars. A significant relationship between strategic decision-makings and organization performance was established. The paper revealed that strategic decision-makings and organization performance will be incorporated as such decision support system these factors will be the catalyst between strategic decision-makings and organization performance. The paper recommended that responsible managers should be geared towards facing and tackling the challenges of strategic communication like poor authority structure, lack of coordination and support from other management levels and resistance from lower levels and poor planning activities in order to realize better performance. Keywords: Strategic Decision-Making, Strategic Communication, Organisational performance