Future workplace re-imagination: A multi-scenario analysis in international entrepreneurial SMEs

Abstract

This paper aims to encounter the scholarly demand for comprehensive identification and investigation of the factors that highlight the sense of the “workplace of the future.” Besides, this study sheds in-depth qualitative and quantitative insights into analysing such drivers in international entrepreneurial small and medium enterprises of emerging economies like Iran. A mixed method of systematic literature review and hesitant triangular fuzzy Delphi was initially employed to identify and finalise the significant factors. Afterwards, the causal level-based relationship network and the finalised factors' power map were accomplished for three distinct scenarios (i.e., the pessimistic, probable and optimistic conditions). To this end, a novel integration of hesitant triangular fuzzy sets and interpretive structural modelling-matrix-based multiplication applied to a classification was designed and applied. As a result, future workplace concerns were systematically reviewed. From the initial list of 34 factors, eight were selected from the perspective of three panels of experts (15 international entrepreneurs) as the most crucial for international small and medium enterprises due to implementing the hesitant triangular fuzzy sets. Furthermore, the selected factors were categorised and levelled according to the novel interpretive structural modelling-matrix-based multiplication applied to a classification method developed in this article. Accordingly, for each scenario studied, from low to high uncertainty and indeterminacy, a separate conceptual model illustrating the relationship among the factors propelling the reimagining of the future of the workplace was presented.