Organization and Flexibility: How to build a Resilient Organization in the Context of Industry 4.0?

The increasing importance of flexibility for competitiveness of organizations in the digital age where changes are driven significantly by the fourth industrial rev-olution are the main issues discussed in the article. The aim is to identify the main pillars on which managers should focus when creating a resilient organization. The need for flexibility which underlies viability and resilience of organization re-sults from action of two forces: the extropy representing intelligence, flexibility and creativity of the organization and the entropy representing the tendency of the system to move to a disordered state. Organizational changes are metaphorically represented as thermodynamic changes in four basic stages. The result of theoret-ical research is new model of flexible organization introduced in the article with an emphasis on flexible work arrangements as these may help increase flexibility in various forms including numerical, functional, localization and time flexibility. Even though the fourth industrial revolution is built on pillars of digitalization and application of technologies, their effective use is not possible without people. They are the driving force of the transformation of the organization within the concept of Industry 4.0. Our model of organization built on flexibility represents the possibility to cope with changes through effective use of human potential supported by flexible work arrangements.