| Which health services organizations are likely to follow strategies that lead to greater success and financial viability? Why are some health services organizations more successful than others? What types of environment, organization, and strategy tend to be associated with more successful organizations? What are the attributes of less successful organizations? Can more and less successful health services organizations be categorized based on their attributes? Are there an infinite number of categories or only a few? Are the categories different for more successful than they are for less successful organizations?;Five more successful archetypes and five less successful archetypes were found. Archetypes occurred among organizations with statistically greater probability than would be expected by chance. Scores on the variables of the more successful archetypes were different than those for less successful archetypes. The findings show that there are relatively few configurations of environmental, structural/organizational, and strategy-making variables associated with more successful health organizations and with less successful organizations. They also show that bivariate or other more simplistic analyses may not be able to capture the richness of detail and nuance needed by managers. This study provides a new basis from which health services managers can evaluate the strategies of their organizations in today's environment.;These questions were the impetus for this study. The hypotheses for the research were (a) there exist a relatively small number of configurations of environment, structure/organization, and strategy which characterize health services organizations, and (b) of these configurations, or "archetypes," those of more successful health services organizations will differ from those of less successful health services organizations. Data were obtained either from organizational documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission or from published case studies for 77 health services organizations across all sectors of the health services industry. Twenty-one success, environmental, structural/organizational, and strategy-making variables were scored for each organization. Using obverse (Q-methodology) factor analysis, more successful and less successful organizational configurations were identified with part of the data set and confirmed with the remainder of the data. |
