Organization Change Management

Organization Change Management

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Organization Change Management

The Topic of the Article

“How flexibility facilitates innovation and ways to manage it in organizations”

Article Objective

Flexibility refers to the ability to adjustment and to acclimate to a challenging setting. It can be spontaneous or adaptive. Adaptation and change are regarded as the innovation key elements. This article aims at examining how various forms of flexibility can play a major role in the process of innovation

Methodology and Means of Article Analysis

This article has employed the literature review concept to analyze the role of flexibility in enhancing innovation. The paper defines various forms of flexibility based on the research conclusions and scholars perspectives as presented in previous academic materials. It then evaluates how various defined forms of flexibility influence innovation and creativity. The paper also examines how audience flexibility influences innovation and how flexibility can be enhanced to influence innovation. All these arguments are highly based on diverse previous researches conducted by other scholars on different aspects of innovation or flexibility. The paper focuses on all possible views and thus, its conclusion is highly based on extensive knowledge regarding the topic. The paper is supported by an extensive number of scholarly literatures dated from as early as 1940s to 2003. In this analysis, the authors present their own views and arguments, and support them with previous work done by one or more scholars. Thus, the analysis involves a rich discussion that is highly convincing and appearing to the reader. The authors have also used real examples of how flexibility fostered innovation either out of pressure or without pressure in order to support their argument on the role of different forms of flexibility in fostering innovation.

Argument Advance in the Article

Flexibility has highly been associated with innovation and creativity. Flexible individuals are said to have diverse perspectives that can easily lead to development of different ways to use one item to solve different problems or coming up in different ways to solve a single problem. In this article, Georgsdottir and Getz (2004) classified flexibility into two groups which include spontaneous and adaptive flexibility. Adaptive flexibility refers to the ability to employ new techniques to handle an issue when old techniques have resulted to a stalemate, or to redefine the issue so as to establish an original solution. Spontaneous flexibility is on the other hand regarded as the ability to establish diverse solution to an issue when there is no pressure that forces one to be flexible. This involves individual interest in acquiring knowledge and employing diverse knowledge to create something or to solve a particular problem. This is one of the strategies that most scientists have employed to discover new technologies in the world. Flexibility of the current structures of knowledge is said to act as a source of novel ideas which initiate creativity in any environment. The people ease of switching across category and between various categories boundaries can be a gauge of their knowledge structure flexibility, and this acts as an essential source of innovation and novelty.

Individual level of flexibility is said to be highly determined by conative aspects that include cognitive styles and personality traits. Individuals with preferred manners of behaving and relatively stable are said to be more creative and highly flexible. Others include openness-to-experience, wide interest, open-minded, and need for change. Sensation-seeking, is another trait that enhances flexibility and hence increasing individual openness to innovation. Normally individual with high innovative ability manage to integrate two opposing personality traits and live comfortably with them. The authors also focused on cognitive styles where it was established that innovation and creativity in facilitated by the manner in which one employs his or her cognitive ability to handle a problem. For instance progressive style of solving a problem is impulsively flexible contrasted to conservative style. Exploration style is also related to flexibility and increased chances of resulting to innovation. Flexible individual based on cognitive perspective can take constraints advantages to develop creative solution. They can perceive a problem in various angles, and even redefine issues into new problems to be able to obtain ideal solutions. On personality bases flexible individual tend to be open to change, complex, and to have a preference to strong and novelty experiences (Georgsdottir and Getz (2004).

Based on the analysis, flexibility is considered to be very essential in the development of innovative solutions in any environment. The paper focuses more on organization management where most managers consider being conservative to reduce the operation risks, an aspect that the authors find to play a great role in hindering innovation and creativity in organization. In this regard, the authors discuss various ways that organization can improve flexibility to enhance organizations’ level of innovation. According to Georgsdottir and Getz (2004), the complementary and the main techniques for flexibility improvement include changing the work organization, altering individual rigid attitude, and creating individual flexibility. Teamwork enhancement has been identified as one way to enhance flexibility in work environment. By soothing the boundaries between specialized people, and making them to work as a team, flexibility can be attained by turning rigid people to be more flexible individuals. It also offers an organization a chance to explore an issue from various perspectives, thus, creating chances for enhancing innovative solutions or ideas. Flexibility that focuses on innovation in an organization can also be enhanced by changing the organization structure, altering the rigid attitudes of managers, and creating flexibility in management. This assists in providing and practicing new views on organizational innovation (Georgsdottir & Getz, 2004).

Article Conclusion and Findings

In the conclusion, the paper provides a brief summary of the entire discussion, focusing more on measures employed to enhance flexibility for innovation in organization work and settings. According to the conclusion the current business environment is experiencing a high level of change as new competitors emerge, and consumers’ needs changes. This results to great need of change in various business environments in unprecedented scale. Thus for an organization to be able to survive in this changing environment, it should be able to adapt swiftly to new conditions. This means both the organization and the employees must be flexible enough to enhance a high level of creativity and innovation to increase chances of prosperity and growth, and to reduce the level of vulnerability.

Implications for Managers in Organizational change Processes

According to Bishwas (2014), growth and survival are two main organization concerns in the current setting where changes take place rapidly and suddenly. A company can survive in the current environment only if it is highly flexible to adapt to the changes and innovative enough to solve its problem in a unique and economic way. Flexibility has been found to play a major role in enhancing organization change. It has highly been associated with individual creativity and innovation. Managers that are highly flexible can highly employ cognitive leadership styles that initiate innovation and hence changes in an organization (Hayes et al., 2011). Workplace flexibility that include outsourcing and human resource flexibility is the most essential type of flexibility and contains a platform to build and base other flexibility levels in the firm, to deploy workers’ entrenched knowledge and admission to external knowledge required to innovation abilities (Martinez-Sanchez et al., 2007; Origo & Pagani, 2008). The flexibility central role is to enhance survival and more organizational success on a turbulent setting that is typified by the new tendencies in the whole world. Flexible organization enhances speed, innovations, and creativity, all of them being integrated in the processes of organizing and coordinating (Todorut, 2008; Sheidan & Conway, 2001). Thus, managers have to be highly flexible to be able to enhance the organization ability to adapt to changing environment. In addition, they need to have the ability to foster flexible cognitive styles in an organization to motivate innovative culture that can easily result to rapid changes to keep up with changing technology and consumers need, and hence to enhance the organization competitive advantage (Taylor et al., 2000).

Argument Strengths

The main strength of the argument is that it is highly based on previous research that investigated the flexibility role in innovation and came up with concrete conclusion regarding the matter. The argument is also highly supported by real life examples that makes one understand the actual role that flexibility can play in different situation to enhance the development of more economical and effective innovative solution. The argument is also systematically presented from the introduction to classification of flexibility, to conative aspects of flexibility, to the role of flexibility in improving innovation and the application of this concept in management environment and what can be done to enhance innovative flexibility in an organization. This systematic structuring enhances the level of the reader’s understanding while reading through the text.

Argument Weaknesses

The main weakness of the argument is that it is not supported by empirical research done by its actual authors. It is only based on work of others, with some of the reference materials being so old to represent the current rapid level of change in the organizations. The argument also fails in identifying the actual measures that can be employed in organization to change individual managers’ flexibility level, particularly for those who have embraced conservative forms of leadership and are not ready to take higher risk.

References

Bishwas, S. K. (2015). Achieving organization vitality through innovation and flexibility: An empirical study. Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, doi 10.1007/s40171-014-0089-2.

Georgsdottir, A. S., & Getz, I. (2004). How flexibility facilitates innovation and ways to manage it in organizations. Creativity and Innovation Management, 13(3), 166-175.

Hayes, G. R., Lee, C. P., & Dourish, P. (2011). Organization routines, innovation, and flexibility: the application of narrative networks to dynamic workflow. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 80, doi:10.1016/j.ijmedinf.2011.01.005

Martínez-Sánchez, A., Pérez-Pérez, M. Luis-Carnicer, P., Vela-Jiménez, M. J. (2007). Teleworking and workplace flexibility: a study of impact on firm performance. Personnel Review, 36(1), 42-64

Origo, F., & Pagani, L. (2008). Workplace flexibility and job satisfaction: some evidence from Europe. International Journal of Manpower, 29 (6), 539-566

Sheridan, A., & Conway, L. (2001). Workplace flexibility: reconciling the needs of employers and employees. Women in Management Review, 16(1), 5-11

Taylor, P., Quintas, P., Storey, J., Tillsley, C., & Fowle, W. (2000). Flexibility, networks and the management of innovation. Retrieved from < http://www.open.ac.uk/business-school/sites/www.open.ac.uk.business-school/files/file/publications/research/WP00_2.pdf>

Todorut, A. V. (2008). Innovation, flexibility, change-premises of organizational development. Retrieved from < https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/7968/1/MPRA_paper_7968.pdf>