Identifying Factors Affecting Strategic Flexibility

Background &

Today, human resources are considered the most valuable and important organizational resources that can lead to strengthening the competitive advantage of the organization compared to other organizations. In today's world, which is accompanied by rapid changes and transformations, effective human resources are one of the most important intangible assets in the organization, and the economic growth of the organization depends on empowering them. Managers of organizations want more than anything to gain a competitive advantage over other organizations and it should be known that to achieve this, making the right decision based on what is for the good of the organization and the environment and also creating an environment where mutual relations and effective among employees is one of the duties of management that can only come from a wise manager. On the other hand, in today's competitive world, an organization has a chance to survive if it can continuously adapt to the environmental changes around it. Environmental changes have forced organizations to continuously seek the best solutions and procedures to adapt to their environment and thus achieve a competitive advantage. As business environments become more complex and uncertainty about their future increases, it becomes more difficult to choose strategies that will lead organizations to success; Because gaining competitive advantage requires a commitment to resources and abilities that are in harmony with market conditions and difficult to return and imitate. The fruits of these commitments are borne over time and must be based on beliefs about the future. Working in turbulent business environments requires increasing organizational flexibility.The meaning of strategic flexibility is the ability of a company to respond to uncertainties by adapting goals to changing conditions or taking active action to create change using the organization's knowledge and capabilities. In a stable environment, the concept of traditional management helps organizations achieve success. But this management approach faces limitations in preparing organizations to face environmental uncertainty. For this reason, new management theories have focused on the development of organizational strategic flexibility as a substitute approach for traditional management. Flexibility can be considered as an organizational feature that reduces the organization's vulnerability to unpredictable external changes or puts the organization in a better position to respond successfully to changes. Since organizational success can be examined from various aspects, in this research, considering the importance of the topic of micro leaders in organizations, especially cultural organizations, we aim to identify the factors affecting strategic flexibility in the center of the intellectual development of children and adolescents that It has been active in the cultural field for more than half a century, and as an all-encompassing government body at the national level, it has been in communication and interaction with a wide range of people, especially children, teenagers and parents, and has a recognized position and records at the international level.

The research method was a mixed exploratory (qualitative-quantitative) research design. The statistical population of the research in the qualitative part included (experts and managers of the Center for Intellectual Development of Mazandaran Children and Adolescents in the field of policy-making) in order to reach consensus in the Delphi method, the sample size in the qualitative part was determined to be 17 people considering the law of saturation. And in a small part, the statistical population included the employees of the Center for Intellectual Development of Children and Adolescents in Mazandaran province. In the quantitative section, the sample size was determined to be 153 using Cochran's formula. The sampling method in the quantitative part was a multi-stage cluster design. The method of collecting information is the library method, and the measurement tool in the qualitative part is a semi-structured interview in the quantitative part, it includes a researcher-made questionnaire, the questions of which were taken from the data obtained from the interview. In order to analyze the data, the Delphi technique was used in the qualitative part and the structural equation modeling method was used in the quantitative part. SPSS and LISREL software was used.

The findings showed that the variable "strategic flexibility" has three dimensions: 1. organizational compatibility, 2. organizational value, and 3. organizational competition.

According to the qualitative stages of the research resulting from the answers of research experts in the Delphi technique in four stages. Also, according to the quantitative part of the research, the reliability of the internal consistency method for each dimension, convergent and diagnostic validity (differentiation of extracted structures based on the final model) was confirmed, and also according to the coefficients obtained for the dimensions of the research model, the questionnaire The compiled results of these dimensions had high reliability. Finally, the "strategic flexibility" variable has three dimensions: 1. Organizational compatibility, 2. Organizational value, 3. Organizational competition. It should be mentioned that the Center for Intellectual Education of Children and Adolescents should act step by step and gradually according to a road map and long-term strategic plan, and in order to implement it, it is necessary to develop an operational letter. Of course, these variables are not among linear variables, therefore, in the field of presenting a comprehensive model, this issue has been investigated, and the model presented by experts in the field of management, such categories are distantly related, and the model presented by experts in the field Management and training have a direct relationship with the organization's citizenship, in some cases, it is necessary, in other places it may have an indirect effect on the organization's citizenship behavior due to the variable of leadership. In some cases, in some concepts, these variables may overlap.