Högskolan i Skövde

Strategic flexibility is a critical capability for firms to respond to turbulent business environment in a timely manner through resource deployment. However, the knowledge of how firms could better use their internal resources to develop strategic flexibility remains limited. Moreover, most existing studies on resource-related antecedents of strategic flexibility focus on financial resources. To address these gaps, this study aims to examine how resource management contributes to the development of strategic flexibility. Specifically, it explores the role of resource management in achieving strategic flexibility and investigates how human resource and technological resource activities influence strategic flexibility.

The qualitative method was adopted and data was gathered by seven semi-structured interviews with 14 informants from seven small gaming firms in Sweden. Our empirical findings suggest that resource management (e.g. resource leverage and resource structure) may enable strategic flexibility. While human resource activities may have limited influence on strategic flexibility, technological resource activities (e.g., technological acquisition, upgrade, shift, and operation) may have positive influence on strategic flexibility, especially its proactive form. Furthermore, this study offers novel insights into the role of strategic orientations in enabling strategic flexibility, indicating that technological and market orientations may jointly contribute to strategic flexibility. The findings also suggest the integration of human resource and technological resource activities may positively influence strategic flexibility.

This study advances the understanding of resource management in the development of strategic flexibility and provides valuable insights for managers and practitioners on how to effectively leverage their human and technological resources to sustain competitive advantage.