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Purpose: The purpose of this study is to analyze the changes organizations can adopt to move beyond budgeting. We show how these changes can be understood as modes of adaptive performance management that explains the ways in which organizations move beyond budgeting to become more adaptive. The proposed modes are then used to derive propositions for future research.

Methodology/approach: We follow a conceptual approach through an analysis of the beyond budgeting principles using the management and systems literatures on radical decentralization. We theorize how organizations can enhance their adaptability to environmental uncertainty through changes to their management structure and control processes.

Findings: We show that organizations can move beyond budgeting by decentralizing within or beyond their management structure and modifying or removing their budget-based control processes. We propose that beyond budgeting can be conceptualized as four modes of adaptive performance management: better budgeting, advanced budgeting, restricted budgeting, and nonbudgeting.

Research limitations/implications: The four modes of adaptive performance management can be used in future research to consider how changes to management structures and budget-based control processes can enhance the organizational adaptability needed to manage environmental uncertainty.

Practical implications: We show that while the nonbudgeting mode may be most suited to organizations facing high levels of environmental uncertainty, organizations facing low–to-moderate levels of environmental uncertainty can achieve sufficient levels of adaptability with less extensive changes to management structure and budget-based control processes.

Originality/value: The four modes of adaptive performance management reflect different approaches for dealing with environmental uncertainty. Positioning nonbudgeting as one mode and identifying alternate modes of adaptive performance management provides a basis for comparing and understanding the changes organizations make to move beyond budgeting.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of the organizational environments of Indian business organizations and to identify the adaptive response mechanisms that organizations use to cope with their environments. This paper also examines in detail the causal texture of the organizational environments and attempts to build a conceptual model mapping adaptive responses of organizations to different types of organizational environments.

A constructivist stance was adopted in this exploratory study to capture the perceptions of the organizational leaders through the multiple case study design to capture the features of the organizational environments and their causal texture. The multiple case study design used an embedded mixed-methods approach to collect data. Within-case analysis and cross-case analysis were conducted to draw out prominent themes across cases ordered for particular organizational environment types. The study was conducted by following construct validity, internal reliability and external validity guidelines.

The study highlights and describes in detail the characteristics of the different organizational environment types in India. It is revealed that a majority of Indian organizations exist in turbulent environments. There are differences in the adaptive response mechanisms of organizations in the environment types studied. The study specially focuses on the strategies adopted by Indian organizations to adapt to turbulent environments.

This study maps the causal texture of organizational environments in India and maps the organizational adaptive responses to the environment for greater effectiveness. This study offers various strategies to cope with turbulent organizational environments and adds to the research focus on causal texture and adaptive capacities of organizations across different types of environments.

This study contributes to an ignored subject area of organizational environments. Managing organizations in uncertain and turbulent environments is complex, and this study provides an understanding about the various types of adaptive mechanism that are used to cope with environmental turbulence. This study also attempts to answer several questions that previous research works have raised about strategies that organizations use when they fail to cope with environmental turbulence.

This study aims to examine the relationship between the influence of technological disruption and the transformation of business models mediated by adaptive organization and organization learning.

In total, 116 top management teams from the member of the Indonesian Advertising Association (P3I) were recruited for this study. The data was obtained through an online survey and analyzed using the PLS-structural equation modeling (SEM) technique.

This study revealed the importance of organizational learning and adaptive organization in minimizing technology disruption and enabler of the business model transformation. In an always-changing environment, the adaptive organization is the core element and catalyst of firm transformation. The acceleration of business model transformation is empowered through establishing an organization's learning system by exploiting existing knowledge, exploring new knowledge and cultivating a learning culture.

In today’s fast-paced digital world and a constant state of flux, advertising agencies need to build a sustainable business model and structure that allows them to be flexible, adaptive to changes and efficient.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study was the first to develop a model to mitigate technology disruption and enable necessary elements to create a transformation business model.

The purpose of this paper is to outline an empirical study of how professionals experience work and learning in complex adaptive organisations. The study uses a complex adaptive systems approach, which forms the basis of a specifically developed conceptual framework for explaining professionals’ experiences of work and learning.

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 14 professionals from a variety of organisations, industry sectors and occupations in Sydney, Australia. The transcripts were subjected to an adapted phenomenographic analysis, and an analysis using the complex adaptive organisations conceptual framework (CAOCF).

The findings indicated that professionals experienced learning mainly through work, where work was experienced as fluid and influenced by varying degrees of emergence, agency, complex social networks and adaptation. Further, the greater the degree of work fluidity, the greater the impetus towards learning through work, empirically indicating that the experience of learning in contemporary organisations is entwined with work.

This study used the concept of complex adaptive organisations as a conceptual framework, coupled with an adapted phenomenographic methodology, to investigate individual professionals’ experiences of work and learning. The adoption of the concept of complex adaptive organisations provided a rigorous way to adopt a complexity approach. In particular, the concept of emergence provides insights into how organisational complexity influences work and, subsequently, learning and adaptation.

This paper aims to draw on data from a study of professionals’ experiences of work and learning framed by a complex adaptive systems approach to examine the nexus of work and learning in complex adaptive organisations.

The study used an adapted phenomenographic approach and the complex adaptive systems conceptual framework (CAOCF) to analyse data from semi-structured interviews with fourteen professionals from a variety of organisations and industry sectors within Sydney, Australia.

The findings highlight that work in complex adaptive organisations is best described as fluid work. Further, the findings suggest that fluid work influences professionals towards flexible learning approaches that take place in the flow of work.

This paper empirically demonstrates the nexus of work and learning as experienced by professionals in their day-to-day work, as well as the ways in which fluid work influences flexible and adaptable learning through participation in work.

This paper explores how adaptive organizations, companies capable of continuously adapting their organizational model, dynamically solve the universal problems of organizing.

The authors applied grounded theory to data acquired from six interpretative case studies, collected in two rounds of interviews (15 in total), then completing and validating the study’s evidence through triangulation with several secondary data sources.

In adaptive organizations, polyarchies and intrapreneurial employees are essential to shape the division of labour, leading to high levels of autonomy and empowering individuals and teams, while reducing bureaucracy and hierarchy. In terms of the integration of effort, digital solutions are preferred to social proof in the provision of information, while the authors note that incentives are always geared towards developing strong higher-order dynamic capabilities.

This paper has some limitations that could be addressed in future research, including longitudinal studies to analyse the link between the universal problems of organizing and a company's dynamic capabilities.

Adaptive organizations go beyond tech firms in responding to the universal problems of organizing work by making specific use of digital technologies.

The paper studies how companies should organize themselves so that they continuously adapt to an ever-changing competitive environment.

The purpose of this paper is to develop propositions for empirical validation regarding appropriate management planning and control systems (MPACS) in knowledge‐intensive organizations.

The propositions were developed from interviews with members of a knowledge‐intensive virtual organization that is known for its innovative practices regarding intellectual capital (IC) development and surveys from low to middle range managers, using a semi‐structured questionnaire, from a variety of companies. Trends in responses permitted us to identify issues of importance in developing innovative MPACS for knowledge‐intensive companies.

The paper proposes that two variables, the level of IC intensity and the uncertainty of knowledge, are important for determining the degree of adaptive versus generative characteristics that an organization's MPACS should contain. Regarding IC, the paper further proposes that organizations must give careful thought to ensure that both adaptive and generative characteristics are aligned with four MPACS elements of focus, commitment, capability, and learning.

As organizations develop programs to realize the potential from their intellectual capital, many fail to develop MPACS that are appropriate for knowledge‐intensive environments. MPACS should support knowledge creation, as well as knowledge sharing, and contain elements of both adaptive and generative systems.

Project networks are an increasingly salient organisational temporary form to deal with complex problems. It remains unclear, however, whether and how project networks adapt over time, and hence implement changes, both within the span of the specific project, and across projects. The authors apply the performance feedback (PF) perspective to explore how adaptive responses to PF are organised and absorbed within project networks. The authors investigate these matters in the area of humanitarian and development aid efforts, which represent complex social issues. In this context, project networks involve a multitude of actors at different distances from the implementation field, ranging from the donor, through an international Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO), to the NGO’s country offices, local NGOs and the beneficiary communities. This study’s qualitative findings, which the authors generate through an abductive analytical process, highlight that project networks dealing with complex social issues face six paradoxes based on work by DeFillippi and Sydow: the distance, difference, identity, learning, temporal and performance paradoxes. Collective goal setting, adaptive monitoring and evaluation practices, and continuous re-negotiation of aspiration levels emerge as coping mechanisms enabling project networks to internalise insights from the field and translate them into adaptive behavioural responses, mainly at the intra-project level. The authors contribute to a better understanding of adaption in these temporary forms, and particularly in its behavioural consequences. The study also advances knowledge on the PF perspective, through its application in temporary settings, on the level of the project network and in the context of complex social issues, where organisational arrangements strive to pursue multiple interdependent goals.

The author introduces a strategic responsiveness model that reflects an organization’s ability to sense environmental changes and learn from emergent adaptive responses that attempt to realign organizational activities and gain a better fit with the changing conditions. The author shows in computational simulations how superior strategic adaptation is associated with higher average returns and lower performance risk among firms that compete in the same industry contexts and generate negatively skewed outcome distributions consistent with empirical observations. The model is refined to incorporate an interactive strategy-making process, where experiential insights from decentralized initiatives update forward-looking projections in central planning. The ensuing analysis demonstrates how this adaptive strategy-making approach further enhances the favorable risk-return outcomes. The author discusses these findings and the implications for the study of dynamic adaptive strategy-making processes.