Achieving Organizational Flexibility and Competitive Advantage through Information Systems Flexibility: a Path Analytic Study

This paper presents an empirical study to examine the relationship between IS flexibility, organizational flexibility, and competitive advantage. The study presumes IS usage and organizational learning as the intermediate variables. The study used a questionnaire survey to obtain responses from IS users. The survey was carried out with 296 user-respondents from 42 organizations across eight industrial sectors. For the purpose of gaining more insight into a variable, its dimensions were considered. These dimensions were evolved from the literature. The qualitative scales for the dimensions were explained with a scale table. The scale table was constructed using fuzzy possibility values. Each respondent used this table as a guideline before responding to each item in the questionnaire. The data analysis validates the relationship between IS flexibility, organizational flexibility, and competitive advantage. The results of path analysis confirmed that organizational flexibility and competitive advantage could be achieved through IS flexibility.

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