Theoretical Debates and Implications for Future Research of Structural Contingency Theory

구조적 상황이론의 이론적 쟁점과 향후 연구제언

Purpose - This study mainly focuses on theoretical debates and issues which has been resided under umbrella of structural contingency theory. From earlier stage of theory development, structural contingency theory had drawn a lot of suspicious and vicious reputation as well as it acquired a lot of academic followers. However, It is very obvious the contingency perspective had a great role for enlightening the external validity of organizational theory and for drawing huge amount of interests from the real world of management. In short, the questions were like as is this a real theory? Throughout this review process I suggest some critical limitations and directions for the future research. Research design, data, and methodology - From a vast review on previous research related on the structural contingency theory, I draw holistic conceptual framework on the theory and suggest issues and implications on each component of the theory. Following this framework, I summarized almost every theoretical debates and arguments at each segment of the framework from the literature review. As a result, I reviewed issues on the structural contingency theory and propose some suggestions for the future research. I depicted 5 main areas of the contingency perspective and then I reviewed some important theories and proposition in each areas. Results - There are 5 main areas in the conceptual framework and I can find some critical issues in each 5 areas that may harm the theoretic completion. Most of all, I pointed out conceptual vagueness of the meaning of fit, level issues of the research model, and unclear mechanism between goodness-of-fit and organization performance. There were several alternatives in operationalizing the concept of fit, however, there is on one simple and clear common definition or operationalization. We can employ some ideas from the organizational behavior field while getting through this problem of conceptual definition of fit. Conclusion - I pointed out some critical issues on the theory and suggest five main directions for the future research on the structural contingency theory. It is obvious that the most important and most critical point of those limitation is about the conceptualization of contingency perspective itself. If we could not overcome these problems, we can not go further any more.