Barriers To The Implementation Of Strategictransformation Of Steel Enterprises

In recent years,China’s steel industry has been exhibiting a continuous downward trend,facing duel barriers from both the market and the enterprises.First,over the past decades,the rapid development of China’s economy,especially such industries as real estate,automotive and machinery,has directly raised the demand for steel.Therefore,steel factories,large and small,have mushroomed,intensifying the market competition.Besides,steel enterprises lack correct judgment of the market.Decades of production development has resulted in serious overcapacity of steel.Steel enterprises are confronted with both overstocking and operational difficulties.Second,customers have a bigger and bigger demand for quality steel.Some small steel enterprises experience development difficulties as they are unable to produce quality steel due to their backward technologies,disordered management and substandard staff.Third,the external environment facing enterprises,such as policy factors(e.g.environmental protection policies and taxation policies),market environment factors and competitor factors has become harsher.These internal and external factors have brought about a series of severe challenges to the development of China’s steel industry.In this context,China’s steel enterprises must size up the situation,review their strategic positions,and carry out necessary strategic transformation on the premise of fully understanding the market in order to achieve sound and sustainable development.The present thesis proceeds from the barriers to strategic transformation implementation,follows the research approach of “literature review—establishing and revising the model of the barriers to strategic transformation implementation—case validation”,systematically synthesizes the results of studies on the barriers to strategic transformation implementation in domestic and international academia,selects and screens the barriers to strategic transformation implementation on this basis,and preliminarily establishes the theoretical model of the barriers to strategic transformation.Such methods as questionnaire survey and interview are applied among experts and scholars,practice professionals and relevant practitioners of thesteel industry for the purpose of revising the theoretical model.In addition,Likert scale is employed to design the barriers to strategic transformation and the established scale is used to design the questionnaire survey,copies of which are distributed,recovered and organized in the case company,thereby identifying the five dimensions of the model of the barriers to strategic transformation implementation: environmental barrier,resource capacity barrier,staff barrier,cultural barrier and organizational structure barrier.These five dimensions form an organic whole.This theoretical model is then applied to the case of Group A for validation and revision,eventually arriving at the following conclusions:Conclusion 1: Misjudgment of and over-reliance on the external environment stands in the way of the implementation of strategic transformation in steel enterprises;Conclusion 2: The singularity of enterprise resource capacity poses a barrier to the implementation of strategic transformation in steel enterprises;Conclusion 3:Enterprise employees’ inertial thinking and uncertainty about transformation hinder the implementation of strategic transformation in steel enterprises;Conclusion 4: A“strong” enterprise culture causes employees to form fixed thinking,which holds back the implementation of strategic transformation in steel enterprises;Conclusion 5: A complex and overly-hierarchical enterprise organizational structure forms an obstacle to the implementation of strategic transformation in steel enterprises.