Sustainable performance increase and strategic turnaround management: current corporate restructuring experiences in the Romanian market

Assuming that “change” is an ongoing, ordinary business condition, this paper seeks to introduce turnaround management as an ongoing management task to secure competitive advantage.

The paper briefly reviews the impact of market turmoil on successful corporate management with particular reference to the Romanian market. It includes key learning based on structured, qualitative interviews of executives (corporate CEOs and leading corporate banking managers). Building on it, the paper comments pitfalls out of several emprical case studies at Eastern European companies, lost in a deemed “ever‐lasting growth” trap while losing grip over their true roots of competitive advantage. It assumes that turnaround management and sustainability are not mutually exclusive corporate paradigms during times of incisive economic recession.

Ongoing turnaround management can be a successful key to achieve sustainable corporate performance improvement.

Turnaround refers to multiple stakeholders, market dynamics and corporate culture; hence it differs in different contexts. This might result in a slight limitation to generalizing the findings to other organization types. Replicating analogue research in different market contexts and corporate cultures would be a beneficial follow‐up research pattern.

Practical implications are ongoing turnaround management targets to anticipate corporate crisis. It includes multilateral perspectives (corporate executives' view, organizational support, external influencing forces, other stakeholder perspectives) and operates at different management levels (strategic scenarios, operative scenarios, decision and implementation management, monitoring and adapting). Mere cost reduction based management practices prove insufficient to maintain competitive advantage, even in times of incisive market turmoil.

The paper provides insights on different dimensions of turnaround management and the way it sustainably enhances corporate performance. It distinguishes its view from the frequently reactive and mainly cost‐cutting‐based character of turnaround management in management literature.