Abstract:
The operational reliability of organizations that deal on a routine basis with very
dynamic circumstances has been a rich domain of study for organizational scholars for
many years. Increasing reliance on the application of complex technologies and human
processes in a range of social endeavour provokes our need to understand the attributes
of such processes. Traditional contingency theoretic perspectives tend to produce
archetypal resolutions that identify in rather specific terms what organizational forms
can be matched with particular environmental characteristics. But as the organizational
environment becomes more dynamic this approach seems less credible. This research
therefore moves beyond the search for archetypes to investigate the processes by which
resources are configured in order to deal with dynamic circumstances. Further, with
self-managed teams increasingly acknowledged to be central to performance,
contributing to fast, flexible and creative action and therefore used as the fundamental
work group, this study focuses on the meso-level of the team. This helps to limit the
scope of the research task while still offering opportunities for good theoretical and
practical contribution. Adopting a grounded, qualitative methodology it triangulates
evidence from three dissimilar domains (accident and emergency, air traffic control and
fire service) that share a common context of unpredictability, high velocity and error
sensitivity. The findings identify a specific type of situated behaviour, termed agile
configuration, by which team members configure remarkably flexible and reliable
behaviours in very dynamic situations, suggesting an almost limitless range of potential
configuring behaviours that avoid the limitations of configurational archetypes. The
adduced models and explanations provide theoretical insights that increase
understanding of behaviour in extreme contingencies and therefore advance traditional
contingency theoretic perspectives, with particular relevance for concepts of dynamic
capability. These outcomes also have practical potential for the development of agile
configuration competence in self managed teams and larger organizational groupings.
