The Research on Influencing Factors of Strategic Flexibility Based on ISM

Abstract

Strategic flexibility has been an indispensable approach for enterprises to confront dynamics and uncertainty in current business context. A large number of researches have been studying strategic flexibility, which include extensive analysis of its influencing factors. However, these studies involve a diversity of perspectives, which makes it confused for enterprises to understand incentives and impediments of strategic flexibility systematically. To provide a more comprehensible and visualized explanation, this paper applies ISM (Interpretive Structural Model) as the tool to classify the hierarchy of influencing factors of strategic flexibility. We select 14 influencing factors from previous literature, and use the method of ISM to structure them into a hierarchical model with 4 layers. As the research demonstrates, influencing factors in these 4 layers exert direct, implementary, supportive and fundamental impacts on strategic flexibility respectively. In the essence, this paper expects enterprises to benefit from the hierarchical division through understanding sequences and priorities in facilitating strategic flexibility.