اثر متن بر انعطاف پذیری استراتژیک – مرور انتقادی Influence of Context on Strategic Flexibility – A Critical Review

1. Introduction Strategic flexibility is reported to make significant contributions to firms by implementing changes enabling the firm to adjust it to changes. Thus, it is stated to function in making the company more proactive leading to gaining competitive advantage and being beneficial to firm performance (Teece, 2007). However, it is found that although flexibility is considered as an important dynamic capability (Zhou and Wu, 2010) which is driver of firm competitive advantage in turbulent environments, existing studies show controversial results regarding the relationship between Strategic flexibility and firm performance (Hai, 2014) On one side, some practical studies support the idea that strategic flexibility improves firm performance (Nadkarni and Herrmann, 2010). On the other hand, a group of studies, however, suggest that strategic flexibility also is related with some shortcomings (Hai, 2014). For example, it is argued that applying strategic flexibility may result in high costs and preventing the firm from emphasizing on strategic goals. Besides, empirical studies such as Kapasuwan et al. (2007) have not been able to establish a high connection between strategic flexibility and higher performance in firm (Hai, 2014). As can be seen, there is not mutual agreement on relation between strategic flexibility and firm performance. The Issue of facing Controversial results in relationship between strategic flexibility and firm performance can be related to two reasons. The first reason is that despite the attention paid to strategic flexibility in the literature, previous studies have mostly taken into consideration flexibility with different dimension variable in investigating its effect on performance. In fact, there is not common understanding on identity of Strategic Flexibility. Different researchers have adopted single dimension flexibility as a one dimensional indicator of Strategic flexibility, while every type has its own applications. In fact, some studies undermine the importance of some dimensions of strategic flexibility (Van et al., 2012); Sopelana et al., 2014). Some researchers such as Hai (2014) incorporate the Resource Flexibility as the only indicator, while some other studies (Cingoz, 2013) have taken the Diversity of strategic actions and the Speed of Responsiveness as the indicator of strategic flexibility. Some other studies (Nadkarni and Narayanan, 2007) consider strategic flexibility as a combination of Resource Deployment and Competitive Strategic Actions flexibility as the proactive and reactive actions taken by management. Thus, there should be empirical studies examining the effect of different dimensions of strategic flexibility on firm performance, with which the risk of making partial conclusion can be minimized (Van et al., 2012).