Thirty-five years of strategic planning and firm performance research: A meta-analysis

This paper uses meta-analytic techniques to explore the relationship between strategic planning and firm performance. The results of 39 studies, representing 74 independent effect sizes and 5,223 firms, are synthesized. Using moderator analysis this study also explores the relationship between the primary research design attributes of financial measure utilized, controlling for industry, definition of planning utilized, firm size, length of measurement period and the type of data employed, and performance outcomes in an attempt to provide possible explanations for the inconsistent results obtained in planningperformance studies over the past 35 years. The overall standardized difference in means of 0.257 (p<.001) is consistent with prior reviews of the strategic planning-performance literature. An analysis of publication bias however calls this relationship into question. When imputed studies are added to the results using trim and fill the imputed mean drops to 0.109 (-0.235, 0.242), indicating that the results are sensitive to publication bias. A discussion of the effect of research design attributes on study results is given along with suggestions for future research.