Author(s): Gurcharanjit Singh Veer Singh, Zizah Che Senik, Mohd Hizam Hanafiah, Roshayati Abdul Hamid
The strategic management practices play an important role in determining effective organizational management, hence, ensuring a successful aspect in an organization. One of the sectors that is given the least research attention from the aspect of strategic management is the co-operative sector. For a developing country like Malaysia, the co-operative sector is the third most important sector after the public and private sectors, which has become more significant in the country’s economic and social aspects. Unfortunately, cooperatives have been seen struggling to maintain their performance in today’s competitive business atmosphere. Despite some researchers have proven that strategic management practices have resulted in increased performance, yet there has been relatively little study of this evidence in small organizations like cooperatives. Thus, a series of three case studies were performed to establish the effect of strategic management practices on the performance of cooperatives. From the findings, three propositions (strategy formulation, strategy implementation, evaluation and control) based on the strategic management practices were confirmed to be affecting the performance of cooperatives in Malaysia. Further, this study has contributed new knowledge in cooperative literature in relation with cooperative performance explained by strategic management practices.