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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 article proposes an adaptive strategy for managing knowledge in complex organizations. Specifically, this article aims to extend understanding in the field of knowledge management (KM) by examining how an adaptive strategy for managing knowledge can help organizations become innovative and build dynamic capabilities.

Literature on complexity theory and KM is reviewed to propose the development of an adaptive strategy that will assist organization in managing knowledge and becoming innovative. The paper is structured around the following constructs: complexity theory, complex adaptive systems, and KM.

A link between an adaptive strategy for managing knowledge, innovation and dynamic capability is established. The central proposition of the article is the organizations that follow adaptive complex processes for managing knowledge are better able to compete in the market today.

This article extends prior research on KM by proposing complexity theory as a framework for establishing adaptive strategies for managing knowledge and fostering innovation.

With the dramatic environmental changes and fierce competition that organizations are faced with today, managing knowledge becomes critical for driving creativity and adapting to changing markets. Organizations lack direction on how best to develop an adaptive strategy for managing knowledge. The revelation of adaptive processes for managing knowledge in complex systems can lead to more effective KM practices and a higher rate of creativity and flexibility.

The study answers recent calls for defining processes for the second generation of KM that shift focus from the codification and transfer of knowledge to the creation of new knowledge. Although previous studies have established a link between complex adaptive systems and KM, this study takes it one step further in defining an integrative strategy for the creation of knowledge based on the processes of complex adaptive systems. The paper provides a foundation for future studies to test the causal relationship between adaptive processes for knowledge creation and innovation.

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 deepen the understanding of adaptive governance, which is advocated for as a manner to deal with dramatic changes in society and/or environment. To re-think the possible contributions of organizations and organization theory, to adaptive governance.

Based on social systems theory this study makes a distinction between “governance organizations” and “governance communities.” Organizations are conceptualized as the decision machines which organize and (co-)steer governance. Communities are seen as the social environments against which the governance system orients its operations. This study considers the adaptive mechanisms of organizations and reflect on the roles of organizations to enhance adaptive governance in communities and societies.

Diverse types of organizations can link or couple in different ways to communities in their social environment. Such links can enhance the coordinative capacity of the governance system and can also spur innovation to enable adaptation. Yet, linking with communities can also slow down responses to change and complexify the processes of deliberation in governance. Not all adaptive mechanisms available to organizations can be used in communicating with communities or can be institutionalized, but the continuous innovation in the field of organizations can inspire continuous testing of small-scale adaptive mechanisms at higher levels. Society can thus enhance its adaptive capacity by managing the role of organizations.

The harnessing of insights in organization theory and systems theory for improving understanding of adaptive governance. The finding that both experiment and coordination at societal level are needed, toward adaptive governance, and that organizations can contribute to both.

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to explore the role of strategic leadership under conditions of uncertainty and unpredictability. The authors argue that highly improbable, but high-impact events require the upper echelons of management, traditionally the custodians of strategy formulation to offer a new kind of strategic leadership focused on new mindsets, organizational capabilities, more in tune with high uncertainty and unpredictability.

Drawing on strategic leadership, and complexity leadership theory, the authors review the literature and present a conceptual framework for exploring the nature of strategic leadership under uncertainty. The authors conceptualize organizations as complex adaptive systems and discuss the imperatives for developing new mental models for emergent leadership.

Strategic leaders have a key role to play in preparing their organizations for episodic disruptions. These include developing their adaptive capabilities and building resilient organizations to ensure their organizations cannot only bounce back after a disruption but have the capacity for transformation to new fitness levels when necessary. Strategic leaders must engage with complexity leadership by seeing their organizations as complex adaptive systems, reconfigure their leadership approaches and organizations to build strategic adaptive capability.

This is a conceptual paper and the authors cannot make any claims of causality.

Organizational leaders need to reconfigure their mental models and leadership approaches to reflect the new normal of uncertainty and unpredictability. Developing the strategic adaptive capability of organizations should prepare them for dealing with high impact events. To assure business continuity in the face of disruptions requires building flexible, adaptable business models.

The paper focuses on how managers can offer strategic leadership for a new normal that challenges some of our most cherished leadership and strategic management paradigms. The authors explore the new mental models and leadership models in an era of great uncertainty.

This empirical research draws on the existing theory of transformational leadership, adaptive culture and organizational resilience, and investigates the effect of the elected TQM leadership style “transformational leadership” through the mediating effect of adaptive culture on organizational resilience, that is the key of survival during crises like the recent COVID-19 pandemic, which has severely impacted the business globally.

This study exploited a cross-sectional online questionnaire of a random sample of Dubai service firms, with the unit of analysis being at the firm level. In total, 379 usable responses were received. Regression analysis was conducted to test hypotheses.

The overall findings of this study supported that transformational leadership is positively associated with both adaptive culture and firm's resilience and significantly impacts them. Adaptive culture was found partially mediating the effect of transformational leadership on organizational resilience.

The research findings provide important insights to practitioners (managers and leaders) to better improve their transformational qualities, as these qualities are expected to improve the organizational adaptive cultures and capacity of resilience.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is one of the first studies to examine the transformational leadership effect on organizational adaptive culture and firm's resilience. This investigation expands the boundaries of leadership style theory into new arenas, attempting to partially address the identified knowledge gap in this vein.

Traditional management models are no longer viable in this complex era, with fast-pacing markets and various emergent properties affecting organizational success. The present study acknowledges the need for developing a coherent framework that leaders may use to evaluate their organizational adaptive ability.

This paper uses theoretical analysis.

This paper proposes the CAL-R framework, which identifies key characteristics of complex adaptive systems (CAS). These actionable elements, manifested in respective behaviors, will increase organizational adaptability. Adaptability is then suggested to be the mediating factor between complex adaptive leadership practice and organizational performance.

The suggested actionable elements are developed based on a theoretical, non-measurable approach; however, the need for statistical rigorousness is also acknowledged. Further research and a quantitative approach are also suggested for the development of a sound measurement scale.

Applying effective complex adaptive leadership will potentially provide organizations with a competitive advantage by making them more innovative, able to transform and adapt to environmental needs and changes and eventually meet their goals and reach their vision. Leaders may use the identified actionable elements as benchmarks against which they can evaluate their organizations' complex adaptive leadership readiness (CAL-R).

The CAL-R framework may be used by leaders in order to evaluate their organization’s current adaptive maturity level (ability) and identify the elements they need to focus on more and develop in order to become more adaptive and competitive.

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.