The Ghost in the Machine: A Multi-method Exploration of the Role of Individuals in the Simultaneous Pursuit of Flexibility and Efficiency

Operations management research has been dominated by the quest for organizational or technological approaches to building flexibility and efficiency into a firm’s operations, paying little attention to the role of human agency—the capacity of individuals to affect the organization through their purposeful action. We address this gap in the literature using a multi-method, empirical theory-building study that investigates how managers and employees within an organization cope with the efficiency-flexibility trade-off. We generate a preliminary set of propositions through an interview study involving 46 subject matter experts from Germany, Italy, Slovenia, Spain and the UK. We then re-examine these propositions using a survey-based triangulation study involving 276 managers operating in the same five countries. We provide a more general rationale for our propositions by borrowing the attention-based view of the firm as well as theoretical contributions from the organizational memory and organizational improvisation literature. We propose that people operating within an organization’s workflow contribute to reducing the efficiency-flexibility trade-off by supporting the execution of three tasks that cannot be fully codified “a-priori,” which we label prospecting, blueprinting and patching. Additionally, we find that the abilities supporting the execution of these tasks must be distributed across the workflow functions for efficiency and flexibility to be obtained. Finally, in contrast with extant literature, our findings downplay the role of production workers in the attainment of efficiency and flexibility. We conclude by discussing the implications of our study for the literature on manufacturing flexibility, ambidexterity and operations strategy.