Organizational Adaptive Capacity

Abstract

Conventional approaches to organizational effectiveness and survival in highly volatile and complex environments focus on adaptation strategies of cost cutting and rationalization. The authors propose that building adaptive capacity is a more appropriate organizational strategy in such environments. Using Giddens’s structuration theory, they discuss multiplexity, redundancy, and loose coupling as important structural dimensions of adaptive capacity and highlight the challenges involved in managing these dimensions. Because structuration theory considers simultaneously all aspects of managerial practice, including the political, cognitive, and normative aspects of managing change, it offers a useful framework for understanding adaptive capacity as a strategy that extends beyond the technical efficiency focus of conventional adaptation thinking.