It is very important for an organization to grow sustainably. Organizations should adjust to the environmental changes in order to gain sustainable growth. By studying the management practice of modern businesses, this paper finds the reason for driving these enterprises to overcome hardships and gain growth in uncertain environment, lies in that instead of depending on the old organizational models, they change themselves into more flexible organizations. Such organizations fit the character of water in oriental culture, so this paper proposes the concept of water-form organizations. Just like water, water-form organizations are the kind of dynamic organizations which can adapt to the environmental changes. Water-form organizations are a combination of internal power and external adaption, so they embody the mixture of internal hardness and external softness, which include four characteristics, namely tenacity, individual initiative, dynamic adaptability, and integration. The construction of water-form organizations can help companies to create sustained competitive advantages in dynamic environment. Such new concept can also enrich and extend the perspectives and dimensions of contemporary organization theory.
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Foreign Economics & Management
LiZengquan, Editor-in-Chief
ZhengChunrong, Vice Executive Editor-in-Chief
YinHuifang HeXiaogang LiuJianguo, Vice Editor-in-Chief
Water-form Organizations: A New Organizational Concept
Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 39, Issue 07, pp. 3 - 14 (2017) DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2017.07.001
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Chen Chunhua, Liu Zhen. Water-form Organizations: A New Organizational Concept[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2017, 39(7): 3–14.
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