Development and validation of an instrument to measure and manage organizational process variety

Abstract

Organizational processes vary. Practitioners have developed simple frameworks to differentiate them. Surprisingly, the academic literature on process management does not – it typically strives for one method to manage all processes. We draw on organizational information-processing theory to systematically develop a new, theoretically motivated classification model for organizational processes. We validate this model using survey data from 141 process practitioners of a global corporation. We derive three distinct types of processes and demonstrate that an understanding of process variety based on process dimensions can differentiate processes better than existing frameworks used in practice. Our findings can enable process managers to make informed decisions and serve as a basis for contingent process management.