Evaluating the Impact of Strategic Alignment on Performance Components of Iranian Pharmaceutical Companies Using...

Sustainable performance in the pharmaceutical industry hinges on the strategic alignment of human resources (HR), marketing, and information technology (IT). Prior studies often examined these domains separately; evidence on their joint influence in Iran's pharmaceutical sector remains limited.

To assess how HR, marketing, and IT strategic alignment relate to profitability, liquidity, and revenue growth using machine-learning methods, and to document model generalization and measurement validity.

This applied, cross-sectional study surveyed 323 managers in Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE)-listed pharmaceutical firms (May to Nov, 2024). A validated questionnaire [CVI/CVR; EFA/ confirmatory factor analysis (CFA); reliability reported] was used only to construct composite indices of HR, marketing, and IT alignment; organizational performance outcomes, profitability, liquidity, and revenue growth (year-over-year) were computed from audited financial statements and then z-standardized. Inputs were min-max scaled to [0, 1]. A feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN; 3-15-1 per outcome; ReLU hidden, linear output) was trained with Levenberg-Marquardt, early stopping, and L2 regularization. Data were split 70/15/15 (train/validation/test) with 5 × 10 repeated cross-validation; bootstrap resampling (B = 1000) produced BCa 95% CIs. Model performance was assessed using mean squared error (MSE), mean absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and R².

Aggregate fit was strong (R² = 0.91; RMSE = 0.134), with comparable validation/test metrics indicating good generalization. The triadic alignment factor showed the highest association with overall strategic alignment (R² = 0.76; P < 0.001). At the subcomponent level, organizational commitment related to profitability (R² = 0.59), and aggressive marketing to profitability (R² = 0.66). Results are associative, not causal.

Machine-learning evidence suggests that coordinated alignment across HR, marketing, and IT is strongly associated with key performance components. The validated instrument, explicit splits, cross-validation, and bootstrap CIs enhance robustness and provide a practical, data-driven framework for managerial action in Iran's pharmaceutical industry.