Abstract

The study was motivated by the United Nations Management Reform programme initiated in 2000 (U.N., 2000). Since then, United Nations organizations focus their spotlight on organizational changes and managerial reforms. However, in the meantime, they have also been struggling to align their management activities to the Reform programme requirements, with limited and varying levels of success. That is primarily due to the degree of complexity of the United Nations as a whole because of its institutional culture, political nature, and the global environmental pressures that the U.N. and all its agencies face today. Therefore, this study argues that United Nations Reform implies the urgency for change. However, change needs to be included as part of the strategy for it to be adequately managed. Organization’s strategic management requires continuous measurement of organizational performance to serve the purpose of reform. Hence, this reform can be reviewed as a management chain of change-strategy-performance-project which can be linked to two ways: integrated and cyclical that allows the organization to improve continuously. It is in this study that all the management components are put together, an integrated view is proposed as the theoretical model, and a Just-in-Time approach is introduced to operationalize the conceptual model in the United Nations context.
The results of this study confirm strategic management positively influences in performance management, which positively influences in strategic implementation (project management) through the integration efforts. Statistically, it is well supported by our research model. The results also confirm that the efforts put to minimize the negative influence of political and institutional pressures would lead to achieving a better programme performance in United Nations organizations. Lastly, this study applies the principles of the Just-in-Time notion to United Nations integrated management model in order to achieve optimal results in efficiency and effectiveness.