Task and Resource Bottlenecks
Drawing on organization design and dynamic capabilities literature on reconfiguration, this paper investigates how various task and physical resource properties may create bottlenecks within systems and impact firm performance. We first resolve the theoretical tension of when centralized tasks are harmful or beneficial to firms by exploring the influence of a system’s task interdependence. In addition, we examine redeployment characteristics of resources, namely their fungibility and slack. Our study is in the context of the U.S. passenger airline industry over two decades. Our findings have important implications for how the design of systems, and specifically allocation of resources to tasks, influence firm performance.