Flexibility in Incumbent Organizations

Abstract

For decades, scholars have theorized structural and cognitive mechanisms of inertia that induce rigidity and stasis in organizations. These scholars have explored organizational capacities to reorient strategies and reconfigure associated capabilities fluently, invoking the notion of “flexibility.” Yet research thus far has conceptualized flexibility as a set of fixed organizational or managerial characteristics. Consequently, we know little about how organizations acquire and develop capacities for flexibility. Across three empirical papers, I examine antecedents, processes, and consequences of organizations’ cognitive and structural capacities for flexibility in which managers and organizations modify their interpretive frameworks, symbolism, and structural configurations to adapt to changing external environments. My findings advance three novel perspectives. First, flexibility can be understood better as a process that may span an extended time period than as something innate to specific managerial or organizational capabilities. Second, my research highlights timing within a broader organizational lifespan as an important unit of analysis to understand how organizations develop and exercise flexibility. Third, my dissertation expands the theoretical scope of organizational adaptation research beyond technological changes and (re)introduces cultural and institutional contexts as important antecedents and consequences of adaptation.