Stuctural Adaptations of Companies in Slovenia in the Period 2000-2005

Abstract

This paper studies intra and inter organizational adaptations to environmental developments. It first develops hypotheses about environmental, organizational and network (intra and inter organizational) adaptations, which examines them on the case of Slovenian companies (with more than 50 employees). The main object of the study is a confirmation of three hypotheses: (1) that macro and micro environmental developments exhibit different logics of change; (2) that organizational adaptations reflect changes in internal contingencies; and (3) that network structure adaptations differ in relation to goal and mean of external collaboration. Besides confirmatory analysis the goal was also exploration of factors that significantly influence perception of environmental change and decisions about intra and inter organizational adaptations. By the later we wanted to give answers to the following questions: Which developments in business environment in period January 2000 – January 2005 were perceived as dominant? How did Slovenian companies respond to environmental changes; especially how did they adapt their organizational and network structures? Research results confirmed all three hypotheses and at the same time showed that (1) external consultants positively influenced organizational structure adaptations and (2) state ownership negatively influenced changes in external relationships