MEASURING STRATEGY COHERENCE THROUGH PATTERNS OF STRATEGIC CHOICES

Strategies at different levels need to be coherent to ensure competiti ve advantage (Hofer and Schendel, 1978). Strategy coherence is the con sistency of strategic choices across business and functional levels of strategy. In this paper we focus on strategy coherence. Using pattern s of strategy, we develop a measure of the extent of strategy coherenc e. The relationship between coherence and performance is used to valid ate the measure. We illustrate the application of the measurement and validation process, in the context of acute care hospitals. The result s indicate that our measure of coherence is monotonically related to p erformance. We also find performance differences between more and less coherent hospitals on the industry specific performance indicator of occupancy. Implications for theory and practice are highlighted.