STRATEGIC PLANNING AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS IN SOCIAL SERVICE ORGANIZATIONS IN PORTUGAL

This study aims to understand the reality of social service organizations, the level of implementation of strategic planning as well as the impact of its application on organizational effectiveness. Firstly, we will group organizations in clusters according to the level of strategic planning implementation and its degree of effectiveness. Secondly, we will conduct the analysis of those groups. Given the growing number of social service organizations and the consequent complexity of their structures, there is a need for these organisations to adopt formal management techniques. Strategic planning is one of such - a valuable strategic management tool and one of its main objectives is to make organizations more effective. Therefore, the research has been conducted in order to determine if strategic planning is implemented in social service organizations and what effects has its application had on organizational effectiveness. The survey, applied to 220 social service organizations, allowed us to group them into different clusters, showing that different levels of strategic planning determine distinct degrees of organizational effectiveness. We believe that the findings of this research may be relevant to decision makers in such organizations, since the research has shown that the adoption of strategic planning has a positive influence on organizational effectiveness of social service organizations.