Exploring strategic fit: an empirical test of the miles and snow model

Abstract

The notion that organizations should seek to align their strategy with their structure, process and environment is at the heart of contingency theories. However, to date, few studies have provided a comprehensive examination of the argument that different strategic choices are associated with distinctive combinations of internal and external characteristics. In this paper we explore the issue of strategic fit by applying Miles and Snow's (1978) seminal model of strategic management with an appropriate set of statistical tests to a panel of over seventy organizations during a three-year period. Using seemingly unrelated regressions to control for the possibility that organizations may adopt a mix of strategies we find that: decentralised structures have positive effects on prospecting and a negative effect on reacting; planning processes have a positive impact on low-cost defending, whereas incrementalism has positive effects on prospecting and negative effects on differentiated defending; and environmental uncertainty has an unexpectedly positive impact on both types of defending. Thus internal structures and processes and the external environment are associated with organizational strategies, but in ways that offer only limited support for the Miles and Snow model of strategic fit.