Organizations can appear aligned even while meaningful gaps are forming between strategy, execution, and culture. The article names this perceptual condition the Alignment Illusion and introduces the Organizational Gap Framework as a way to examine misalignment in the relationships between those domains.
Drawing on qualitative research with senior executives, the paper identifies three organizational gaps: Strategy–Execution, Execution–Culture, and Culture–Strategy. It also proposes that persistent gaps may create spillover effects in an adjacent domain, causing the visible symptom to appear somewhere other than the relationship where the problem began.
The article is openly available from Emerald Publishing under a Creative Commons Attribution licence.