Microfoundations of Performance: Balancing Efficiency and Flexibility in Dynamic Environments

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Eisenhardt, Kathleen M.; Furr, Nathan R.; Bingham, Christopher B.
• 署名单位: Stanford University; Brigham Young University; University of North Carolina; University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• 刊物名称: ORGANIZATION SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1047-7039
• DOI: 10.1287/orsc.1100.0564
• 发表日期: 2010
• 页码: 1263-1273
• 关键词: Organizational structure; strategy; DYNAMIC CAPABILITIES; AMBIDEXTERITY; semi-structure; microfoundations; SIMPLE RULES; dynamic environments; cognition

摘要

Our purpose is to clarify the microfoundations of performance in dynamic environments. A key premise is that the microfoundational link from organization, strategy, and dynamic capabilities to performance centers on how leaders manage the fundamental tension between efficiency and flexibility. We develop several insights. First, regarding structure, we highlight that organizations often drift toward efficiency, and so balancing efficiency and flexibility comes, counterintuitively, through unbalancing to favor flexibility. Second, we argue that environmental dynamism, rather than being simply stable or dynamic, is a multidimensional construct with dimensions that uniquely influence the importance and ease of balancing efficiency and flexibility. Third, we outline how executives balance efficiency and flexibility through cognitively sophisticated, single solutions rather than by simply holding contradictions. Overall, we go beyond the caricature of new organizational forms as obsessed with fluidity and the simplistic view of routines as the microfoundation of performance. Rather, we contribute a more accurate view of how leaders effectively balance between efficiency and flexibility by emphasizing heuristics-based strategies of simple rules, multiple environmental realities, and higher-order expert cognition. Together, these insights seek to add needed precision to the microfoundations of performance in dynamic environments.