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Flexible Organization

A proper flexible organization provides its work force arrangements where employees are given greater freedom to balance their work and personal commitments such as family, higher education, community activities, religious commitments, professional development, and general interests.

Above is Atkinson's model of a flexible firm. He argued that firms increasingly seek 4 kinds of flexibility functional, numerical, pay, distancing.

Functional flexibility is a qualitative approach to work, and refers to management's ability to deploy and redeploy particular sections of the workforce on a wide range of tasks in response to market demand as and when required (Sparrow 1998 cited in Teicher & Holland 2006 p. 241-242). To ensure that this can be achieved efficiently, employees are trained in a wide range of skills. The volatility of product markets and the blurring of skill boundaries through technological change provide the continuing environment for the development of this form of flexibility (Mathews 1989 cited in Teicher & Holland 2006 p. 242).

Numerical flexibility is a quantitative approach to labour utilisation that is based on the principle of adjusting the size of the workforce to the levels of economic activity at short notice (Atkinson 1984 cited in Teicher & Holland 2006 p. 242). As the workload fluctuates, management has the option to adjust or redeploy its human resources accordingly. Casual, part-time contractors and subcontractors typically provide this form of flexibility (Morehead et al. 1995; Burgess 1997 cited in Teicher & Holland 2006 p. 242).

A secondary form of numerical flexibility is distancing, which relates to the outsourcing of activities that may include core and non-core activities. The outsourcing of non-core activities is well established (for example, cleaning, catering and security) and the increased outsourcing of traditional core activities, particularly in the human resources area (Herriot 1998; Fisher et al. 2002 cited in...