Between Strategy and Sabotage: A Faux Pas, Technophobia, or Ghanaian Thing?

Ghana’s public sector organizations are generally characterized by workplace practices that often seek to sidetrack financial, material, and human resources for purposes other than organizational prosperity. Interestingly, such unethical employee conduct has become the norm, or a ‘Ghanaian Thing’ (GT). Although this is an affront to effective strategy implementation, researchers have often glossed over its contribution to the continual weakening of public institutions in the country. Using a qualitative study, this paper examined factors of the GT and their impact on strategy execution in four public institutions of Ghana. Findings of the study revealed that strategy-sabotage interface, celebrating sabotage, resistance to change, information hoarding, and ‘cash leadership’ underlie much of the prevailing organizational ineffectiveness in Ghana. The study further revealed that these GT strategies thrive mainly on organizational disorder. To strengthen Ghana’s public institutions, therefore, the five GT enablers must be disabled using appropriate technological interventions.