Dynamic Capabilities and Organizational Change in the Journal of Strategy and Management.
Virtual Issue, Spring 2022
Dynamic capabilities help firms adapt to rapidly changing environments. The Journal of Strategy and Management has recently featured six articles dealing with dynamic capabilities and organizational change. First, Paul Clemens Murschetz and colleagues presented a literature review of articles using the dynamic capabilities framework with a focus on media management. In a study of Portuguese firms, Ricardo Jorge Correia and colleagues found that business performance depended on the capacity of firms to collect information on customers and competitors, disseminate this information through the organization, and then respond to market challenges. Using a case study of the automotive industry as a setting, Hoeft proposed a holistic framework for assessing dynamic capabilities which considered time and both technological and non-technological capabilities. Korhan Arun and Saniye Yildirim Ozmutlu used survey data from managers of firms in Turkey and found that dynamic capabilities were a predictor of organizational performance, and environmental munificence was a predictor of dynamic capabilities.
Reed studied a related issue: that of firms’ strategic agility, or their ability to make fast decisions and reconfigure their resources rapidly. He conducted a CEO-level survey of firms in the U.S., and found that new firms benefited from strategic agility in highly turbulent environments, while older firms benefited most in less turbulent environments. Finally, Florian Haumer and colleagues approached the issue of organizational change from the perspective of the individual. They conducted an experiment and discovered that tailored messages can improve employee engagement for change, but only when the message fits the employee’s personality type. Therefore, managers should be aware that individual differences are important in the management of organizational change.