Arsalan Nisar

Impact of knowledge brokering on performance heterogeneity among business models

PURPOSE - The strategic management literature lacks a comprehensive explanation as to why seemingly similar business models in the same industry perform differently. This paper strives to explain t ...

Organizational Structure Shapes Performance in Dynamic Environments: Studying the Relationship Between Structure and Performance

There has been a long-standing concern that strategy literature needs a better understanding of how organizational structure can affect performance and decision making within organizations. Previous research indicates that the relationship between organizational structure and performance is unexpectedly asymmetric. The balance between too much and too little structure is critical for an organization’s high performance in dynamic environments. Organizations with too little structure lack enough guidance but can be flexible, while organizations with too much structure are too constrained and lack flexibility. In addition, less structured emergent strategies tend to be high performing in dynamic environments, whereas more structured prescriptive strategies tend to perform well in stable environments. Accordingly, the optimal amount of structure decreases with increasing environmental dynamism, a consistent finding in existing literature. In this paper a review of literature on how organizational structure influences performance within organizations and the role of the environment is presented. It also incorporates and signifies the role of the Strategy, Structure and Performance (SSP) paradigm, which has played a central role within strategy research. By means of this, we will be able to know how the core knowledge required for decision-making and the coordination challenges within firms drive their internal structures, and how the implication of the appropriate degree of strategy-structure fit on the performance of a firm. The aim here is to develop a more precise theory of the fundamental relationships among structure, performance and the environment.