The Impact of Strategic Management Practices on the Performance of Commercial Banks: A Survey in Vietnam

Abstract

The long-term viability and sustained competitiveness of commercial banks hinge critically on the effective adoption of strategic management practices. This study focuses on assessing the influence of key strategic management dimensions, namely environmental scanning, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, and strategy evaluation and control, on the overall performance of commercial banks in Vietnam. Framed as a quantitative investigation, the study employs a causal-comparative research design to explore the nature and magnitude of these relationships. Primary data were collected via a structured questionnaire, distributed through simple random sampling to 216 managerial-level respondents from ten commercial banks operating in Vietnam. Both descriptive and inferential statistical methods were applied using SPSS to analyze the collected data. The results reveal strong explanatory power for the proposed model, with an R² value of 0.685, indicating that the examined strategic management practices significantly account for variations in bank performance. Among the four strategic dimensions, strategy formulation emerged as the most influential predictor, exerting the strongest impact on both financial and non-financial performance outcomes of Vietnamese commercial banks. These findings underscore the imperative for bank executives in Vietnam to institutionalize strategic thinking and consistently apply structured strategic management approaches.