No abstract

Great strategies are worth nothing if they cannot be implemented [1]. It can be extended to say that better to implement effectively a second grade strategy than to ruin a first class strategy with ineffective implementation [2]. Thus, effective implementation of strategies is important to the success of every entity. There are many ways of classifications of strategy. However, there are ten schools of thought that dominate recent thinking on strategy. These ten schools or models of strategy formulation were proposed by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel in their book "Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour through the Wilds of Strategic Management". The "learning school" is one of these schools. From the perspective of this school, there is the emergence of strategies as people act individually but most of the time through concerted efforts, learning about a phenomenon as well as their entity's competence in dealing with it. There are criticisms of this model saying there is the danger of going to the opposite extreme which may result in no strategy, lost strategy or wrong strategy. However, the study provides insight into the adoption and application of this strategy as well as the enormous benefits that accrue to learning organizations. The authors, having reviewed a vast number of literature, have summarized the concept of the learning school as "all hands-on-deck phenomenon" where individuals or employees are empowered in teams to improve their desire and ability to create and explore what they want in order to understand and manage the organization and its task environment.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are still hailed as the panacea of economic development of many countries, since they play a fundamental part of the economic fabric in developing a crucial role in furthering growth, innovation and prosperity. In the quest to achieve growth, SMEs unfortunately face severe challenges including the marketing of their products, which stem from unqualified employees in the marketing department, inadequate finance to undertake marketing research, go international, and to participate in trade fairs among other factors. Leaving most SMEs to face these challenges alone usually leads to high rate of demise and low growth rate, hence government and other multi donor organizations provide support to these SMEs in the area of finance, market, managerial capacity building among others. This research assesses the impact of the government support in the form of marketing assistance (training of marketing staffs, access to foreign marketing, trade fairs and exhibitions) to some selected retail SMEs in the ten Regional Capitals of Ghana on their growth. Using firm data report, the results indicated that the provision of support for SMEs to participate in trade shows and exhibitions highly impact positively on SMEs growth, followed by the provision of support in access to international market, and support in the training of marketing staffs of SMEs.

No abstract

Purpose: The main purpose of this research was to investigate the impact of empowering leadership behavior on subordinates’ creativity in teams, and the mediation role of team information sharing following self-determination theory (SDT) in the banking sector of Ghana.Methodology: The researchers used the quantitative approach to investigate the causal relationships among the variables. Primary survey instrument in the form of questionnaires were distributed across 14 branches of a popular commercial bank in Ghana to obtain data. The authors gained the participation of the 14 branches based on random sampling technique from a list of banks at the head office in the capital city. The sample included 264 leader-subordinate pair surveys across 48 teams. Hierarchical Regression Analysis was used for data analyses and hypotheses testing.Findings: The study established a positive relationship between empowering leadership and team creativity, while team information sharing revealed a significant mediation between empowering leadership and team creativity.Unique Contribution: The study offer a unique contribution to the  leadership and creativity research at the team level that incorporates a theory in an  investigation of the mediation mechanism of teams’ symmetric information sharing and dissemination in the Ghana Banking sector.