Meta-Analytic Evidence on Strategy Content and Public Service Performance

Venerable research on strategy content argued that prospectors have a positive relationship with public service performance and outperform defenders, while reactors are negatively associated with performance. Published integration studies supported these propositions, but relied on simplistic integration techniques. In this article we undertake a meta-analysis (articles=20, coefficients=123) to understand how much strategy content matters for public service performance. We find a positive relationship, with a small to moderate population effect size, between prospecting and public service performance and a negative but trivial relationship for a reactor. Unexpectedly the findings for a defender are null. Moderators suggest that a prospector strategy works best in organizations with multiple goals and when performance is measured as an index whereas a reactor’s performance is poor in these contexts. These findings hold up when measured with archival performance indicators and in causal research designs. A defender is associated with higher levels of performance only in single goal focused organizations. These findings are suggestive of the need to reconsider key tenants of the strategy content-performance relationship.