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The aim of this paper is to determine whether leadership affects strategic flexibility and business performance taking into consideration the mediating role of talent management in these relationships.

The proposed framework is tested by confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and finally structural equation modeling (SEM), using the survey data from 462 Greek firms. The mediation effect of talent management was tested by the Sobel test.

The results show that leadership drives firms to strategic flexibility and business performance, but the introduction of talent management fully mediates these relationships. Strategic flexibility also affects business performance positively.

This study explores a formal style of leadership; many leadership styles remain unexplored. The field of talent management is in urgent need of more empirical research to explain its importance and how talent management is handled in the 21st-century.

This study proves that managers should invest more in talent management; outstanding talent can be leveraged to implement the best operational practices while managers' motivation for talent management contributes to a deeper anchoring of strategic flexibility and performance efforts in firms.

The current state of knowledge of both theory and practice for critical organizational factors such as strategic flexibility and talent management will be extended.

The purpose of this paper is to measure the flexibility of business process models. The authors give the notions of flexible process distance, which corresponds to the number of change operations needed for transforming one process model into another, considering the different perspectives (functional, operational, behavioral, informational, and organizational).

The proposed approach is a quantitative-based approach to measure the flexibility of business process models. In this context, the authors presented a method to compute the distance between two process models. The authors measured the distance between a process model and a process variant in terms of the number of high-level change operations (e.g. to insert or delete actors) needed to transform the process model into the respective variant when a change occurred, considering the different perspectives and the flexible features.

To evaluate the flexibility-measurement approach, the authors performed a comprehensive simulation using an emergency care (EC) business process model and its variants. The authors used a real-world EC process and illustrated the possible changes faced in the emergency department (possible variants). Simulation results were promising because they fit the flexibility needs of the EC process users. This was validated using the authors’ previous work which consists in a guidance approach for business process flexibility.

The authors defined six different distances between business process models, which are summarized in the definition of total process distance. However, changes in one perspective may lead to changes in other perspectives. For instance, adding a new activity may lead to adding a new actor.

The results of this study would help companies to obtain important information about their processes and to compare the desired level of flexibility with their actual process flexibility.

This study is probably the first flexibility-measurement approach which incorporates features for capturing changes affecting the functional, operational, informational, organizational, and behavioral perspectives as well as elements related to approaches enhancing flexibility.

This study aims to investigate how market orientation (MO) motivates firms to develop business model innovation and how such effects are moderated by strategic flexibility.

In this study, a questionnaire-based survey was undertaken to test the proposed hypotheses. The empirical study was conducted on a sample of 204 firms using two key informants (408 respondents) in China. The regression model is used to test the proposed model.

This research finds that both responsive market orientation (RMO) and proactive market orientation (PMO) have a positive effect on business model innovation. The effects of RMO and PMO on business model innovation are contingent on resource (coordination) flexibility in different ways. More importantly, this study finds that resource flexibility enhances the positive effect of RMO and weakens the positive effect of PMO. The study also finds that coordination flexibility enhances the positive effect of PMO.

Future research can explore the internal mechanisms through which RMO and PMO promote business model innovations. Although the study finds that both the MOs promote business model innovation, they may promote business model innovation through different mediating effects. Future research can explore the role of external dynamic capabilities. This research mainly focuses on the internal dynamic capability of focal firms. However, as a focal firm-centered boundary spanning activity system, to transform into a new business model, firms not only need to reconfigure internal resource base, but also need to realign external collaboration network.

This research also bears important managerial implications. First, firms should be aware of the positive effect of MO on business model innovation. Firms with higher level of RMO or PMO can promote business model innovation. Second, when firms implement RMO for business model innovation, managers should focus on resource flexibility. Where MO is responsive, marketing managers need to be concerned with ensuring various applications of existing resource so as to understand effectively the current customers and market domain. Third, to leverage PMO for business model innovation, firms should adopt coordination flexibility. For firms with higher level PMO, firms should try to find the new internal coordination process for customer latent needs.

The conclusion extends the business model innovation research from the view of dynamic capabilities. As one of types of dynamic capabilities, MO is also the important antecedent of business model innovation. Further, this research also discusses the role strategic flexibility plays in business model innovation.

This study aims to track product market competition and financial flexibility on firms’ business strategies.

For this purpose, 187 listed firms on the Tehran Stock Exchange were selected by the systematic elimination for 2012–2018. The hypotheses were examined using the linear regression model. Ittner and Larcker’s (1997) model assesses the business strategy (dependent variable). The Herfindahl–Hirschman index is used to assess the product market competition (independent variable). Finally, the Frank and Goyal’s (2009) model investigates financial flexibility (independent variable).

The findings indicate that competition in the product market has significantly declined the resort of defensive and invasive business strategies and intensified opportunistic analytical and opportunistic strategies, benefiting from financial flexibility and facilitating defensive and opportunistic adaptation and decreased analytic and invasive strategies. Besides, the product market competition contributes to the firm’s financial flexibility and analytical, opportunistic, invasive and defensive strategies. Most of the studies in the field of business strategy analyzed some factors, such as performance (Zhang, 2016), tax avoidance (Higgins et al., 2015) and share pricing risk (Habib and Hasan, 2017). There is no study to assess the effect of business strategy on product market competition and financial flexibility.

The present study’s findings provide some invaluable concepts for firm managers on the significance of competition in the product market and financial flexibility. Focusing on competition intensity and flexibility level can deal with the board’s ambiguities on market structure and competitive status. The use of profitably competitive investment opportunities leads to selecting the most beneficial strategies, leading to a more efficient allocation of scarce resources and, finally, the enhancement of organizational performance.

The aim in this paper is to describe and explain the flexibility offered by different business models adopted by different firms as they strive to achieve higher levels of business performance.

Cross‐sectional research is used to investigate a matched pair sample of 20 high‐performing and 20 low‐performing firms in the UK. The relationship between business model architectures and focus are examined and their implications for flexibility are illustrated and discussed.

The flexibility offered by different business models is explored through the way organisations select and integrate three inter‐related elements to devise flexible business models, i.e. network influence, transactional relationships, and corporate ownership. Affected by situated practices in each business network and the market position or business size, companies select and integrate various configurations of these elements to respond to the constantly evolving demands of end‐customers.

Although based upon a cross‐sectional analysis of a matched pair sample, the concept of “flexible business models” has far wider managerial implications. The efficiency of the proposed approach is achieved through the reduction into three inter‐related elements that allow flexible configuration and re‐adjustment.

Companies can use the flexible business model approach to examine their own selection and integration of network influence, transactional relationships and corporate ownership and scrutinise their flexibility and performance in the marketplace.

The contribution of this paper is the development of the flexible business models concept, based on an empirical investigation of firms in the UK.

The aim of the current study is to empirically assess the effects of organizational flexibility on project portfolio (PP) performance, with the mediating role of innovation and moderating effects of environmental dynamism (ED) and absorptive capability (AC).

Data were collected from 173 manufacturing firms and analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with the help of a partial least squares (PLS) approach.

Results show that innovation partially mediates the relationship between organizational flexibility and PP performance. Furthermore, the moderating effect of ED between organizational flexibility and innovation was analyzed. Additionally, AC also observed as a moderator between innovation and PP performance.

Based on the resource-based view, this study contributes to the literature by addressing the roles of innovation, ED and AC in the relationship between organizational flexibility and PP performance. Implications for managers also discussed in the end; for example, to be more competitive, they should incorporate flexibility into the firm to encourage innovation. It also emphasizes to select new innovative opportunities that correspondingly have effects on the PP performance.

A literature review conducted for this study showed that although different aspects of supply chain flexibility have been studied, research on the factors affecting supplier flexibility and the impact of supplier flexibility on supplier performance are conspicuously absent. The present study aims to fill in this gap in the literature.

A quantitative research design was adopted. Data were collected from 119 manufacturing companies operating in Turkey and analyzed by structural equation modeling.

The findings show that supplier flexibility is associated with environmental uncertainty, relationships with the buyer and the quality of information shared between the buyer and the supplier, but not with the level of information shared between the buyer and the supplier. The findings also indicate that supplier flexibility affects supplier performance.

The generalizability of the findings can be considered as a limitation. In the future, sector-based larger-scale studies are desirable. Also, data can be collected from both the main business and suppliers and findings may be compared.

The findings of this study help decision-makers to make more informed decisions about information exchange, supplier relationships and environmental uncertainties depending on the degree of flexibility that they request from their suppliers.

A literature review for this study indicated that there is a lack of research on the factors affecting supplier flexibility. Therefore, this research is expected to make an original contribution to the literature.

The purpose of this study is to gain some insights into how managers perceive and achieve financial flexibility and its value in coping with the 2008 global financial crisis. The study focuses on the following questions: What are the sources and measures of financial flexibility? Do financially flexible firms suffer a lower impact from the crisis? Is financial flexibility related to business flexibility? and Is financial flexibility important for the firm's capital structure decision?

This paper employs two methods: a questionnaire survey and interviews with chief financial officers (CFOs). The results are used to examine the relation between the firm's financial flexibility level and the impact of the global financial crisis on its liquidity, investments, capital structure and business operations. The results are used to analyze the robustness of different financial flexibility measures constructed from the survey data to identify an appropriate financial flexibility measure.

The main finding is that firms with high financial flexibility suffer lower impact from the crisis. The results show that firms with greater internal financing are likely to have lower leverage, higher cash ratios, and suffer a lower impact from the crisis on their business operations. The analysis indicates that an index based on the firm's leverage, liquidity, and operating ratios, similar to the Altman Z‐score, might be a better financial flexibility measure than long‐term debt ratio. The evidence also suggests that financial flexibility is a part of the firm's business strategy and is important for its capital structure decisions.

A major challenge for researchers is how to measure the firm's financial flexibility level, as it is unobservable and difficult to quantify. The innovation of this paper is to directly ask managers about the firm's financial flexibility, from both internal and external financing, construct several financial flexibility variables based on the survey data, and examine their correlations with the global financial crisis impact, to identify a robust financial flexibility measure. The research also provides unique data to investigate the value of financial flexibility during a severe credit crisis.

The purpose of the present research is to explore the relationships between corporate social responsibility (CSR), authentic leadership and business model flexibility during times of unprecedented crises.

The research approach in this study is conceptual. After a brief review of the literature associated with CSR, authentic leadership and business models, the authors introduce a model describing the interaction of authentic leadership and business model flexibility on CSR heterogeneity.

This research explains how firms that are led by authentic leaders and that have flexible business models will be more engaged with their stakeholders than firms with less authentic leaders or more rigid business models during unprecedented crises.

Prescriptions for practitioners are suggested for improving authentic leadership as well as making adaptations to the firm's business model. Regarding authentic leadership, firms can screen potential new hires and existing employees for authentic leadership qualities. Firms can also rely upon existing interventions shown to assist in authentic leadership development for current leaders. At the business model level, firms can focus on core resources and their application in related product and service markets.

Firms engaged in CSR activities benefit more from those activities when leaders are authentic. However, in times of unprecedented crises, business model flexibility may also dictate the extent to which firms can satisfy their stakeholders. The authors introduce a conceptual model that takes the elements of authentic leadership and business model flexibility into account to explain CSR heterogeneity.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) electronic service (e-service) allows a company to decrease transaction costs, expedite delivery time, and serve more customers. Flexibility lets e-service providers improve their service without costly and time-consuming infrastructure overhauls to cope with the changing business environment. Little work has been done to associate flexibility with e-service. This paper aims to provide a conceptual taxonomy of e-service flexibility in line with the online purchase in a customer activity cycle (CAC), as well as a theoretical model to investigate the relationships among a company's internal flexibility, e-service flexibility, customer readiness and firm performance.

Based on an extensive review of e-service and flexibility literature, the paper develops a taxonomy of B2C e-service flexibility in a CAC framework and a conceptual model to show the influence e-service flexibility exerts on firm performance and the factors that support e-service flexibility.

This research identifies the important e-service flexibility in each CAC stage, discusses the influence of e-service flexibility on firm performance and an organization's internal flexibility supporting e-service flexibility, and argues that customer readiness has an important influence on firm performance as well.

The conceptual model of e-service flexibility and propositions need further empirical validation.

This paper should help managers identify the critical e-service flexibility that satisfies their customers and the core internal flexibility that supports flexible e-service. It should help managers consider customer limitations when developing e-service flexibility.

This research sets some theoretical and research foundation for future empirical studies. First, the research provides a conceptual definition of e-service flexibility in line with the CAC. Based on the definition, measurements of e-service flexibility in each stage of CAC could be developed and the e-service flexibility construct could be validated. Second, the conceptual model outlines the relationships between a company's internal flexibility, e-service flexibility, customer readiness, and firm performance. The theoretical model provides the foundation for empirically testing the influences of interactions between a company and their customers on firm performance.