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The most important aspect of strategic management should be to respond to the rapidly and increasingly changing world. The purpose of strategy implementation is putting actions aimed at mitigating the effects of change among organizations (Pandit, 2000). Turnaround strategies deal with a swift change of the organizational strategy to deal with the organizational challenges is it falling profitability, poor service delivery, low return on investment or sales decline. Organizations do not have to reach the edge of a cliff to implement the turnaround strategies but can do so before the crisis erupts (Gotteiner, 2018). The recovery of the organization can take place without the traumas that are associated with the crisis. However, the success or failure of an organization depends on the company’s ability to change effectively from its present life situation to meeting growth challenges (Al-Omari, Maraqa, & Al-Jarrah, 2019; Ghazzawi, 2018). The success of the turnaround strategy is an active process that requires skills, discipline, change, innovation, and teamwork. While some managerial turnaround strategies have been successful, many have failed. Moreover for successful turnaround management, learning from major failures is paramount. Harrigan (2012) further argues that to achieve a successful turnaround, there is a need for different sets of skills.
Thus, in the past two decades, the need for the formulation and implementation of corporate turnaround strategies has been increasingly advocated for by many scholars who are interested in the field of strategic management (Al-Heneiti & Irtaimeh, 2021; Gotteiner, Mas-Machuca, & Marimon, 2019; Heine & Rindfleisch, 2013). This suggests that turnaround strategies are the need of the hour given the severe performance decline of many companies. This has led to the advancement of turnaround management research especially in the developed countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States of America (Kucher & Feldbaurer-Durstmuller, 2019; Schweizer & Nienhaus, 2017). However, it is worrisome to observe that little is known in the context of developing countries especially in African countries. With an upsurge in the number of research publications on turnaround management, the available turnaround literature is now fragmented and detached (Schweizer & Nienhaus, 2017). Consequently, it appears to be the most ideal time to analyze the existing turnaround literature from a bibliometric perspective.
The role of turnaround strategies in the strategic management literature cannot be underestimated. Three turnaround strategies popularised the turnaround mainstream literature, namely, retrenchment, restructuring, and reorganization (Dzingirai, 2021; Battacharya & Malik, 2020; Santana, Valle, & Galan, 2020; Tangpong, Abebe, & Li, 2015; Chen & Hambrick, 2012; Pearce & Robbins, 1993; Robbins & Pearce, 1992; Boyne, 2004). These are mainly devised at a corporate level with aim of turning around the fortune of the organization. Turnaround strategies, at a corporate level, seek to save the organization from acute performance decline. Therefore, the managers appear to be heeding to calls for deepening of their understanding of the dilemmas linked to the formulation and adoption of turnaround strategies by paying much attention to the agility of the organization, resources of the organization, organizational structure and culture, and external conditions. It is in this context that turnaround management is associated with complex internal and external dynamic factors (Baporikar, 2021; Gotteiner et al., 2019; Chen, Widjaja, & Chen, 2017; Panicker & Manimala, 2015; Santana et al., 2010; Schmitt & Raisch, 2013; Guimares, 2013). Notably, the Two-Stage model by Robbins & Pearce (1992) is the most prominent in the turnaround literature (Schmitt & Raisch, 2013).