Configurational Pathways from Corporate Governance and Organizational Culture to Strategic Agility and Radical Innovation in Ghanaian Firms

Abstract

Research on the antecedents of firm innovation in emerging economies has been dominated by net-effects thinking, in which each governance attribute and each cultural attribute is credited with an independent, symmetrical contribution to an outcome of interest. This article argues that this posture misdescribes how Ghanaian firms actually work, because the governance arrangements prescribed by the Companies Act, 2019 (Act 992), the Securities and Exchange Commission Corporate Governance Code for Listed Companies (2020), the Bank of Ghana Corporate Governance Directive (2018), and the National Corporate Governance Code (Institute of Directors-Ghana, 2022) do not operate on strategy directly but through the cultural settlement that determines whether unwelcome information reaches those who hold decision rights. Drawing on the neo-configurational perspective in organization theory, on stewardship and resource dependence accounts of boards, on the strategic agility literature, and on African scholarship concerning communal obligation and deference, the article develops the Governance-Culture Conversion Framework. The framework treats strategic agility as the conversion mechanism through which governance authority and cultural permission are transformed into the reallocation of attention, money, and talent, and treats radical innovation as the distal payoff of that conversion. Nine propositions specify conjunction, equifinality, causal asymmetry, and substitutability among five governance conditions and five cultural conditions, and four ideal-typical pathways are derived: the stewarded founder pathway, the professionalized ambidextrous pathway, the regulated buffering pathway, and the communal consensus pathway. A fifth configuration, described here as compliance without capability, is advanced to explain the reliable absence of radical innovation. The article closes with a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis research design, including calibration anchors suited to Ghanaian data, and with recommendations for boards, regulators, and the drafters of future revisions of the National Code.