Re‐examining Strategic Flexibility: A Meta‐Analysis of its Antecedents, Consequences and Contingencies

Abstract

Strategic flexibility (SF) is a concept that has evolved from strategy through other disciplines, including management, marketing, innovation, entrepreneurship and operations. However, despite attempts to consolidate the domain of SF, there remain theoretical and empirical tensions underlying its antecedents, the consequences and contingencies. Based on 106 independent samples reported in 98 different studies (n = 26,940 firms), we provide a meta-analytical examination of these tensions. We highlight and resolve several disagreements regarding the enablers, inhibitors and triggers of SF, and we reveal an adjusted mean performance effect of 0.24. We further find that the measurement of SF, as well as some, but not all, dimensions of the environment, moderate the performance effect. Finally, an explorative analysis reveals that innovation outcomes and market outcomes mediate the positive relationship between SF and financial outcomes, in addition to a negative direct effect. These insights provide a comprehensive and coherent understanding of the nomological network of SF and a stronger basis for further theorizing and conducting empirical research. Moreover, our findings help firms to refine their strategy by implementing the right enablers that drive SF and to understand how and when their investment in SF pays off.

The Trajectory of Two Decades of Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management and Flexibility Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…The journals in the operations management area, such as the International Journal of Production Research , International Journal of Production Economics , Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management, and International Journal of Supply Chain Management, have given a reasonable emphasis on reporting flexibility research. Though some journals have not appeared in the top ten journals in respective categories, occasional publications on flexibility have appeared in these journals such as Long Range Planning (Eppink, 1978 ; Volberda, 1997 ); Journal of Management Studies (Dai et al, 2018 ; Evans, 1991 ); Organization Science (Eisenhardt et al, 2010 ; Volberda, 1996 ; Young-Ybarra & Wiersema, 1999 ); Journal of International Business Studies (Allen & Pantzalis, 1996 ); Operations Research (Huchzermeier & Cohen, 1996 ); California Management Review (Bahrami & Evans, 2011 ; Upton, 1994 ); Academy of Management Perspectives (Hitt et al, 1998 ; Shimizu & Hitt, 2004 ); European Journal of Operational Research (Beach et al, 2000 ); Omega (Bengtsson & Olhager, 2002 ); Academy of Management Journal (Nadkarni & Herrmann, 2010 ); Decision Sciences (Yu et al, 2013 ); International Journal of Management Reviews (Brozovic, 2018 ); Business Strategy and the Environment (Perez-Valls et al 2016 ); Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal (Brinckmann et al, 2019 ); British Journal of Management (Dalziel, 2009 ; Hatum & Pettigrew, 2006 ; Herhausen et al, 2021 ); Ecology and Society (Olsson et al, 2006 ), and so on. Thus it can be observed that a variety of leading journals have published flexibility research in the past, but sporadically.…”

Network approaches and strategic management: Exploration opportunities and new trends

“…The contemporary conditions of business operations create new challenges for strategic management. These include, for instance, the use of dynamic capabilities in strategy building (Segal-Horn, 2004;Teece, 2007;Krzakiewicz & Cyfert, 2014;Herhausen, Morgan, Brozović, & Volberda, 2021), relational strategies (Zakrzewska-Bielawska, 2017), networking of organizations (Krzakiewicz & Cyfert, 2013;Czakon, 2016), technology development and automation of processes (Schwab, 2016), global strategies (Porter, 1986;Gupta, Govindarajan, & Wang, 2008). In view of these challenges, some researchers postulate the assumption of a new term: neostrategic management (Vrdoljak, Raguž, Jelenc, & Podrug, 2016).…”

Foundations of strategic flexibility: focus on cognitive diversity and structural empowerment

“…Hitt et al (1998) concluded that it reflects the capability of the firm to proact or respond quickly to changing competitive conditions and thereby develop and maintain competitive advantage (1998, p. 26), whereas, Wright and Snell (1998) defined strategic flexibility as a firm's abilities to reorganize its internal resources in response to new developments emerging in the market. While some minor differences in the construct's definitions still exist, researchers agree that strategic flexibility represents an inherent flexibility of a firm's resources that enable business organizations to make necessary internal changes in response to new external developments (Herhausen et al, 2021;Brozovic, 2018). Based on past literature, strategic flexibility should be, therefore, recognized as one critical factor that can determine either the success or a failure, of business organizations operating in dynamic environments.…”

“…Ample research also investigated how business organizations could increase their strategic flexibility, recognizing the effect of such factors as a configuration of internal resources (Combe et al, 2012;Matusik and Hill, 1998;Sanchez, 1995), processes and organizational designs ( Van der Weerdt et al, 2012;Lei et al, 1996) or different types of organizational culture (Zahra et al, 2008). Although substantial progress in the debate on the antecedents of strategic flexibility has also been made, nevertheless, the question of how firms could increase their strategic flexibility still remains relevant (Herhausen et al, 2021). Consequently, the present study aims to fill this research gap by answering the following question:…”