Configuring in high velocity error sensitive circumstances: A grounded study

The operational reliability of organizations that deal on a routine basis with verydynamic circumstances has been a rich domain of study for organizational scholars formany years. Increasing reliance on the application of complex technologies and humanprocesses in a range of social endeavour provokes our need to understand the attributesof such processes. Traditional contingency theoretic perspectives tend to producearchetypal resolutions that identify in rather specific terms what organizational formscan be matched with particular environmental characteristics. But as the organizationalenvironment becomes more dynamic this approach seems less credible. This researchtherefore moves beyond the search for archetypes to investigate the processes by whichresources are configured in order to deal with dynamic circumstances. Further, withself-managed teams increasingly acknowledged to be central to performance,contributing to fast, flexible and creative action and therefore used as the fundamentalwork group, this study focuses on the meso-level of the team. This helps to limit thescope of the research task while still offering opportunities for good theoretical andpractical contribution. Adopting a grounded, qualitative methodology it triangulatesevidence from three dissimilar domains (accident and emergency, air traffic control andfire service) that share a common context of unpredictability, high velocity and errorsensitivity. The findings identify a specific type of situated behaviour, termed agileconfiguration, by which team members configure remarkably flexible and reliablebehaviours in very dynamic situations, suggesting an almost limitless range of potentialconfiguring behaviours that avoid the limitations of configurational archetypes. Theadduced models and explanations provide theoretical insights that increaseunderstanding of behaviour in extreme contingencies and therefore advance traditionalcontingency theoretic perspectives, with particular relevance for concepts of dynamiccapability. These outcomes also have practical potential for the development of agileconfiguration competence in self managed teams and larger organizational groupings.