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The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of innovative HR practices as an important mechanism through which strategic flexibility affects firm performance as well as the role of female leadership in this relationship.

Data were gathered from a sample of 113 firms in China. The authors collected information on organizational strategy, HR practices, CEO information, corporate social responsibility and other firm characteristics in terms of firm age, location, and financial performance. Conditional procedural analysis was conducted to test the model.

The authors found strong evidence in support of the mediation relationship in which organizations with a strong focus on strategic flexibility are more likely to adopt Innovative HR Practices. Furthermore, the authors found that the extent to which firms have adopted innovative HR practices has a strong effect on employee productivity. In addition, the authors found that female leadership enhances strategic flexibility-performance relationship.

Information on strategic flexibility, HR practices and firm performance was collected at the same time. Future studies based on panel data would be helpful to establish the causal relationships in the model.

The authors’ findings suggest that practitioners should put more emphasis on developing innovative HR practices, as they are required by strategic flexibility.

Firms pursuing strategic flexibility should feel more confident when appointing a female CEO, because the results show that female leadership may enhance the positive impact of strategic flexibility on firm performance.

This research study is the first empirical examination of the mediating influence of innovative HR practices on the relationship between strategic flexibility and firm performance. The study also shows that female leadership benefits an organization in implementing strategic flexibility. The results are of value to researchers, human resource management managers, employees, and executives who are seeking to develop practices that are flexible and innovative in order to stay competitive in dynamic environments.

Work-life flexibility policies (e.g., flextime, telework, part-time, right-to-disconnect, and leaves) are increasingly important to employers as productivity and well-being strategies. However, policies have not lived up to their potential. In this chapter, the authors argue for increased research attention to implementation and work-life intersectionality considerations influencing effectiveness. Drawing on a typology that conceptualizes flexibility policies as offering employees control across five dimensions of the work role boundary (temporal, spatial, size, permeability, and continuity), the authors develop a model identifying the multilevel moderators and mechanisms of boundary control shaping relationships between using flexibility and work and home performance. Next, the authors review this model with an intersectional lens. The authors direct scholars’ attention to growing workforce diversity and increased variation in flexibility policy experiences, particularly for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality, which is defined as having multiple intersecting identities (e.g., gender, caregiving, and race), that are stigmatized, and link to having less access to and/or benefits from societal resources to support managing the work-life interface in a social context. Such an intersectional focus would address the important need to shift work-life and flexibility research from variable to person-centered approaches. The authors identify six research considerations on work-life intersectionality in order to illuminate how traditionally assumed work-life relationships need to be revisited to address growing variation in: access, needs, and preferences for work-life flexibility; work and nonwork experiences; and benefits from using flexibility policies. The authors hope that this chapter will spur a conversation on how the work-life interface and flexibility policy processes and outcomes may increasingly differ for individuals with higher work-life intersectionality compared to those with lower work-life intersectionality in the context of organizational and social systems that may perpetuate growing work-life and job inequality.

The purpose of this study is to identify, characterize and assess supplier flexibility measurement practices in the order-to-delivery process.

The study involved a survey; participants were 224 purchasing managers at Swedish manufacturing companies that had more than 20 employees.

Scrutiny of the details of measurement practices revealed that most respondents actually do not specifically measure supplier flexibility. Instead they measure other measures like delivery reliability, conduct qualitative follow-ups, or cannot specify how supplier flexibility is measured. It was acknowledged that they measure different supplier flexibility aspects, and the applied measures were characterized, e.g. in terms of which flexibility dimension they represent.

Conceptual clarifications and adaptations to measuring supplier flexibility in the order-to-delivery process are provided. The identified measures can be a contribution in further developing literature on flexibility performance measurement.

Purchasing, logistics and supply chain managers in search of supplier flexibility performance measurement can find ways to measure and an extended flexibility vocabulary. This has the potential to improve flexibility in the supply chain.

Even though flexibility is claimed as being an important competitive advantage, few empirical studies and operationalized measures exist, particularly in the order-to-delivery process.

I aimed to obtain a deeper insight into the link between supplier involvement in product development (SIPD), supplier relationship resilience and company performance.

To collect data, a survey among 500 Polish manufacturing companies was conducted. I used quantitative methods (structural equation modeling) to test several research hypotheses referring to a single supplier–customer relationship. Thanks to the use of multi-construct measurement of SIPD and supplier relationship resilience, the study provides detailed research results on the topic.

Collaborative practices implemented during SIPD increase procurement flexibility and decrease redundancy in the relationship with the involved supplier. Communication during SIPD increases supplier flexibility and procurement flexibility. Increased supplier flexibility and increased procurement flexibility in the relationship with the involved supplier as well as collaborative practices during SIPD positively impact company performance. I confirmed the indirect effect between communication during SIPD and company performance when the mediators are supplier flexibility and procurement flexibility. Decreased redundancy in relationship with involved supplier does not impact company performance.

Supply chain managers need to rethink SIPD practice to effectively ensure supply chain resilience (SCRES), especially in the face of the contemporary global crisis and black swans affecting the supplier base. My article provides important managerial insights into drivers of SCRES and company performance.

To the best of my knowledge, this research is among the first to conclude that SIPD does not have an unequivocally positive or direct impact on supplier relationship resilience. The research fills the gap by analyzing the impact of SIPD on two main SCRES elements. The study examines supplier relationship resilience, understood as flexibility and redundancy elements, in a single supplier–buyer relationship perspective. Thus, the presented considerations go beyond the traditional understanding of flexibility and redundancy in supplier relationship management, that is through the prism of double or multi sourcing and having back up-suppliers.

This paper aims to examine the relationship between supply integration and firm performance by first, investigating the mediating effects of manufacturing flexibility and mass customization; and second, exploring the moderating role of innovation orientation on the link between internal capabilities and performance.

Resource orchestration and contingency theories are used to address the mediating and moderating effects. A cross-sectional data set on 242 Swedish manufacturers is used to test for the hypotheses using structural equation modeling.

The findings provide support for the mediating roles of manufacturing flexibility and mass customization in the relationship between supply integration and firm performance. However, the results point to contrasting contingent effects of innovation orientation. While innovation orientation positively moderates the association between mass customization and firm performance, it shows a negative impact on the link between flexibility and performance.

The study contributes to the literature on the integrative activities with upstream supply chain actors. Specifically, the authors highlight how specific capability configurations comprising of supply integration, manufacturing flexibility and mass customization lead to firm performance. Moreover, the authors provide insights on the contingency role of innovation, especially if firms consider flexibility or customization capabilities.

While the individual impacts of flexibility and customization on performance have been addressed previously, there is a paucity of research on how these two capabilities are integrated with supply integration. Moreover, there is little known regarding the role of innovation orientation on these integrated relationships.

This research has three objectives: one is to develop measuring criteria for ascertaining performance of customs clearance firms, another is to test reliability and validity of the factors, and the third is to analyze the relationship between customer service and firm performance. This research gathered the data from customs clearance firms. Reliability and validity concerned with the collected data are tested by exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis and the relationship between variables is tested by analyzing structural equation modeling. The results are as follows. There are no problems in reliability and validity. According to the result of the analysis, customer service is divided into customer focus, customer needs, customer response and flexibility and performance is classified into customer performance and financial performance. The result of empirical tests is as follows. Customer focus has a positive effect on customer performance and financial performance. Flexibility has a positive effect on both types of performance. This means that firms which have discriminative services and a high level of flexibility through collaboration with customers can achieve high levels of customer performance and financial performance.

Strategic flexibility (SF) has become increasingly important for firms because of the fast changes in the external environment. In line with the practical importance of SF, an emerging research field has developed around it that has attempted to understand the nature of SF and the key relationships. The aim of this study is to unveil the semantic structure of the recent literature on SF and to suggest new promising areas for future research.

The authors conduct a systematic literature review with a bibliographic analysis technique, which allows authors to identify the main recent streams in the literature, as well as offer reflections and suggestions for future research.

The authors uncover three main emerging areas in the research on SF, namely SF as a dynamic capability, the role of knowledge management for SF and the relationship between a firm SF and the external environment. The authors put forward three avenues for future research on SF: Avenue 1. SF, business model innovation (BMI) and other dynamic capabilities (DC), Avenue 2. Digital technologies and SF/organizational agility and Avenue 3. SF and sustainability. Articles included in the special issue entitled “A strategic perspective on flexibility, agility and adaptability in the digital era” contribute to Avenue 2, thus paving the way for filling some of the identified gaps regarding the relationship between SF and digitalization.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this is the first literature review on SF that uses a bibliometric approach to draw conclusions on the findings in the literature. The review contributes to the theoretical understanding of SF by illustrating and explicating core topics that have persisted over time, as well as by presenting three main avenues for further developing authors’ knowledge around SF.

The purpose of this study is to understand the moderating role of market dynamism in the relationship between organizational flexibility and pioneering behavior in tourism firms in Arequipa, Peru. This study aims to delve into the antecedents of pioneering orientation understood as a strategic stance that favors the creation and launch of new products in the market.

This empirical study involved the analysis, using partial least squares regression, of 306 surveys administered to mangers of tourism enterprises. Mediation has also been examined using the bootstrapping method.

The results show that organizational flexibility has a positive impact on pioneering behavior, while market dynamism positively mediates this relationship.

This work provides interesting theoretical and empirical contributions for the management of firms in the tourism sector. Firms should develop capabilities to reconfigure their processes and products to adequately implement and exploit innovations generated in their organizations. In addition, tourism enterprises should improve their performance by creating new products and/or services, aligned with changes in customers' purchasing and consumption habits.

This study aims to elaborate on the background of pioneering orientation understood as a strategic stance that favors the creation and launch of new products in the market. This study also proposes that market dynamism is a factor to be considered in improving this relationship.

El objetivo de este trabajo es comprender el papel moderador del dinamismo del mercado en la relación entre la flexibilidad organizacional y el comportamiento pionero en las empresas de turismo de Arequipa, Perú. El estudio pretende profundizar en los antecedentes de la orientación pionera, entendida como una postura estratégica que favorece la creación y lanzamiento de nuevos productos al mercado.

El estudio empírico involucró el análisis, mediante regresión de mínimos cuadrados parciales (PLS), de 306 encuestas administradas a gerentes de empresas turísticas. La mediación también se realizó utilizando el método de “bootstrapping”.

Los resultados muestran que la flexibilidad organizacional tiene un impacto positivo en el comportamiento pionero, mientras que el dinamismo del mercado media positivamente en esta relación.

El trabajo aporta interesantes aportes teóricos y empíricos para la gestión de empresas del sector turístico. Las empresas deben desarrollar capacidades para reconfigurar sus procesos y productos para implementar y explotar adecuadamente las innovaciones generadas en sus organizaciones. Además, las empresas turísticas deben mejorar su desempeño mediante la creación de nuevos productos y/o servicios, alineados con los cambios en los hábitos de compra y consumo de los clientes.

El estudio pretende profundizar en el trasfondo de la orientación pionera entendida como una postura estratégica que favorece la creación y lanzamiento de nuevos productos en el mercado. También propone que el dinamismo del mercado es un factor a considerar en la mejora de esta relación.

Port performance and port choice have been treated as separate streams of research. This hampers the efforts of ports to anticipate on and respond to possible future changes in port choice by shippers, freight forwarders and carriers. The purpose of this paper is to develop and demonstrate a port performance measurement methodology, extended from the perspective of port choice, which includes hinterland performance and a weighting of attributes from a port choice perspective.

A review of literature is used to extend the scope of port performance indicators. Multi-criteria decision analysis is used to operationalize the context of port choice, presenting a weighted approach using the Best-Worst Method (BWM). An empirical model is built based on an extensive port stakeholder survey.

Transport costs and times along the transport chain are the dominant factors for port competitiveness. Satisfaction, reputation and flexibility criteria are the other important decision criteria. The results also show how the availability of different modal alternatives impact on the position of a port. A ranking of routes for hinterland regions is done.

The paper focuses on two extensions of port performance measurement. So far, not all factors that determine port choice have been included in port performance studies. Here, first, factors related to hinterland services are included. Second, a weighting of port performance measures is proposed. The importance of factors is assessed using BWM. The approach is demonstrated empirically for a case of the European contestable hinterland regions, which so far have lacked quantitative analysis.

The link between supply chain agility (SCA) and performance has been tested in previous research with different samples and results. The present paper quantitatively analyses and summarises the impact of SCA on performance found in previous empirical papers and determines the influence of several identified moderators.

Using a meta-analysis approach based on a systematic literature review, a total of 63 empirical papers comprising a sample of 14,469 firms were meta-analysed to consider substantive (type of performance and SCA operationalisation) and extrinsic (economic region and industry) moderators.

Results confirm a significantly large, positive correlation between SCA and performance. None of the analysed moderators has enabled the identification of any significant differences between the SCA and performance correlations by subgroup. However, high heterogeneity in total variance, both in the full sample and the subgroups by moderator, demands further rigorously reported empirical research on this topic with clearly conceptualised variables and frameworks and the use of validated scales.

Several research gaps and best practice recommendations have been indicated to improve future empirical research on this topic.

Practitioners in different economic regions and industries will find consistent evidence of improvements in performance through SCA.

No meta-analysis has been found in previous research to estimate the value of the correlation between SCA and performance and the influence of moderating variables.