Relationship of Manufacturing Flexibility with Organizational Strategy

Manufacturing flexibility is an essential organizational capability for supporting strategic intent of organizations that seek to outperform competitors in an environment of uncertainty. The specific nature of flexibility characteristics exhibited by different manufacturing organizations depends on their pursued organizational strategic goals. Organizations pursuing a mass production (or, defender strategy) will have a completely different perspective on manufacturing flexibility requirements for their products compared to those seeking differentiation (or, prospector strategy). There are no prominent studies to address the critical relationship between a specific strategy and the type of manufacturing flexibility resource; it should emphasize to remain stable, competitive and performance oriented. The objective of the current study is to draw and investigate the relationship between pursued organizational strategy and manufacturing flexibility. The theoretical framework considers manufacturing flexibility as a multi-dimensional construct with twenty dimensions (MF1–MF20), representing the various activities involved in a production system from procurement of raw materials from suppliers to different production processes in the core company to the distribution of finished products to market. All these twenty dimensions are studied with reference to the two strategy types, to establish the research framework in the form of the hypotheses (H1.a–H20.a and H1.b–H20.b). The findings of the empirical investigation on the data collected from 212 manufacturing firms operating in diverse sectors confirm adequate support for the developed research framework.