The Organizational Improvisation Landscape: Taking Stock and Looking Forward

Abstract

Over the past 25 years, scholars have produced a wide variety of organizational improvisation (OI) scholarship from multiple fields that has improved our understanding of the OI phenomenon. However, because of its complexity and the heterogeneity of approaches used to study it, OI remains challenging to grasp. This makes it difficult for scholars to understand the contributions of this literature both in terms of extant findings as well as potential gaps and future areas of inquiry. Accordingly, we take stock of the extant literature by reviewing 186 peer-reviewed scholarly articles on OI primarily from management and related fields such as entrepreneurship and marketing as well as other disciplines such as information systems and communications. We introduce an aggregate framework that emphasizes the sequential process of OI. We also identify specific theoretical and associated empirical gaps in each of the pre-, during, and post-phases of an OI episode. We specifically address questions surrounding the origination and content of initial improvisational actions, conceptual ambiguity regarding the prevalence of OI, and the confounding of causal factors that impact the outcomes following an OI episode.