Self-Disruption As A Strategy For Leveraging A Bank’s Sustainability During Disruptive Periods: A Perspective from the Caribbean Financial Institutions

Abstract

During crisis situations, self-disruption is becoming one of the strategies through which businesses disrupt the existing operations to introduce new approaches and capabilities that enable them to identify the emerging disruptive trends before they can affect the business’ effective market performance. Since this often bolsters the capabilities of the business to recover from the crisis, it is such values of self-disruption that motivated this study to explore how self-disruption is used by the Caribbean financial institutions as one of the strategies for leveraging a bank’s sustainability during disruptive periods. The study used the quantitative survey research method to evaluate the opinions of 80 bank personnel who were drawn from five different banks that are operating in the Caribbean financial market. Even if some of the respondents disagreed, the survey suggests to achieve the desired outcomes, the strategic process of a bank’s self-disruption requires the analysis of the existing financial market trends as well as proactive sensing of the likely financial market changes. As these are accompanied with the evaluation of the existing bank’s capabilities and weaknesses, it informs the radical change of the areas of weaknesses that must be undertaken to turnaround the performance of the bank during crisis situations. Even if such approach was found to be important for enhancing the effectiveness of self-disruption to take the bank out of the crisis situation, findings still indicated that it is not just lack of innovativeness and inflexible organisational culture which is a challenge, but also the tendency of some banks to use the “wait and see” business philosophy. Combined with the supportive leadership style and approach this was found to affect the efficacy of self-disruption as a strategy for introducing new capabilities that can enable the bank to come out of the unfolding crisis situation. To respond to such challenges, it is suggested that bank executives must adopt the use of a three-stage self-disruption process that leads to self-reinvention that introduces new capabilities to bolster a bank’s quests to come out of the crisis.