Exploring flexibility: dynamics and organizational choices from the Italian case

Nowadays private and public organizations perceive the need to become more and more flexible in order to adapt their structures, mechanisms and people management practices to ever-increasing competitive pressure and evolving social and political dynamics. Although flexibility seems to have become an organizational imperative, economic and managerial theories offer relatively little insight into the process of becoming organizationally flexible and the consequences of flexibility for the organization. In this frame, the paper aim to investigate the organizational mechanism used by organizations to became more flexible, analysing the major factors pushing the flexibility of companies. The paper presents the results of an explorative research in which the systematic review of the literature (phase 1) have supported an empirical analysis (phase 2) on 76 Italian companies. The empirical analysis suggests that the companies are more directed to make choices that require the involvement of actors, parts and resources external to the organization, then choices that concern the combination and innovation of elements and resources already usable inside the company.