Countering Organizational Rigidity Through Operational Resource Bundling: Integrating Resource Orchestration and Dynamic Capabilities

As organizations mature, standardized systems help meet increasing needs for efficiency. However, this often results in resources being used in rigid ways, compromising the flexibility necessary to leverage opportunities, create value, and address customers’ emerging needs. Here we address solutions to this drift to rigidity, focusing on how operational managers bundle resources to create value for the firm. Our qualitative study is based on data collected from an organization with operations across 252 locations. This data consists of 92 interviews with strategic and operational managers, ethnographic observations, and archival records. We uncovered three pathways for resource bundling that are focused on markets, customers, or organizational renewal. In each, senior-level strategic managers initially provided resources, including channels for standardization, information systems, and technical infrastructure that became rigid in their usage. When operational managers sensed this drift to rigidity, they seized flexible resources (connection, solution development, and employee development processes) to combine with the rigid resources. We refer to this as Operational Resource Bundling (ORB). Strategic managers collaborated with the operational managers to adapt how resources were used, helping to ratify, endorse, and mobilize the bundles to achieve value creation and competitive advantage. We extend earlier work by specifying how a particular type of resource orchestration—ORB—constitutes a value-generating micro-mechanism of dynamic capabilities. ORB uncovers the role of operational managers in balancing standardization versus customization through identifying and combining resources.