How Do German SMEs Cope with the Increasing Need for Flexibility.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Decision Sciences Volume 2012, Article ID 569076, 13 pages doi:10.1155/2012/569076 Research Article How Do German SMEs Cope with the Increasing Need for Flexibility? Katharina Roitzsch, Winfried Hacker, Ulrike Pietrzyk, and Uwe Debitz Workgroup “Thinking-Knowing-Acting”, Department of Psychology, Technische Universitat Dresden, Germany ¨ Correspondence should be addressed to Ulrike Pietrzyk, ulrike.pietrzyk@tu-dresden.de Received 2 March 2012; Accepted 23 May 2012 Academic Editor: Gunther Schuh ¨ Copyright q 2012 Katharina Roitzsch et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Within this study a qualitative approach was chosen to find out whether German SMEs deal with flexibility requirements rather strategically or intuitively. Results show that many SMEs do not show strategic approaches. Possible reasons are seen in lacking organizational resources as well as the limited training of the CEOs. A toolbox has been developed to offer applicable information about flexibility measures on a low level. 1. Introduction For several years the globalized economic system increased the requirements small and medium-sized enterprises SMEs have to cope with 1. While big companies have departments of change management, of human resource management, and of production planning, SMEs do not have these resources. Nevertheless, they have to deal with these issues, too: manpower shortage, irregular order situations, or customer demands that become more and more