The Organization Design Task: Reducing Organizational Barriers

The management challenge of flexibility may be observed through looking into the managerial repertoire of flexible capabilities. Since increasing the speed and variety of managerial capabilities proves to be a challenging goal, the firm will not be able to fully utilize its flexible capabilities without an appropriate organizational design. We thus examine flexibility's organization design challenge through identifying the organizational conditions that are necessary for utilizing the flexibility mix. Since the potential for flexibility is determined by the existing organization design, there is a need to determine whether redesigning the organizational conditions is required. The focus of this chapter is thus rooted on examining the organizational barriers to flexibility.