Research worldwide reports low levels of employee engagement reflecting employee well-being. This observation spells dire consequences for enterprise performance, expressed as goal achievement, and attained via strategy. Strategy implementation failure adds to enterprise performance pressures, while reducing employee well-being. Research investigating employee engagement as driver of strategy implementation through dimensions of organisation is limited. This paper conceptually examines how employee engagement can be enhanced while driving strategy implementation through dimensions of organisation. The Nienaber and Martins (2015, Journal of Contemporary Management, 12(1), 401–425) survey results serve as illustration. The conclusions arrived at here show that all six factors – at individual, team/unit, and enterprise levels – can be classified according to the dimensions of organisation. Moreover, the dimensions of organisation are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but rather interrelated, and influence employee engagement in unexpected ways. The contribution of this paper stems from the promise that dimensions of organisation serve as mechanism to drive strategy implementation via employee engagement.

It is often claimed that 50–90% of strategic initiatives fail. Although these claims have had a significant impact on management theory and practice, they are controversial. We aim to clarify why this is the case. Towards this end, an extensive review of the literature is presented, assessed, compared and discussed. We conclude that while it is widely acknowledged that the implementation of a new strategy can be a difficult task, the true rate of implementation failure remains to be determined. Most of the estimates presented in the literature are based on evidence that is outdated, fragmentary, fragile or just absent. Careful consideration is advised before using current estimates to justify changes in the theory and practice. A set of guiding principles is presented for assisting researchers to produce better estimates of the rates of failure.