Organisational improvisation has emerged as a very important phenomenon in the business arena, enabling manager spontaneity to enable change as circumstances evolve (Eisenhardt, 1997). Defined as the substantive merger of planning and execution outside the formal cycle of planning (Kyriakopoulos, 2011; Miner, Bassoff, & Moorman, 2001; Vera & Crossan 2004), there remains a lack of understanding about the phenomenon (Vendelø, ۲۰۰۹), emerging directly from the insufficient investigation of its drivers and context in the international business and management literatures (Kyriakopoulos, 2011).

Improvisation theory proposes that firm characteristics can drive action and execution, but this assumes that firms with high or low improvisation share simply high or low levels of the same internal characteristics. Furthermore, research into improvisation typically has not examined antecedent factors but rather has concentrated on outcomes of improvisation (e.g. Nemkova, Souchon, & Hughes, 2012). Despite the environmental context from which improvisation emerges being a key theoretical contingency (Chelariu, Johnston, & Young, 2002; Vendelø, ۲۰۰۹), extant improvisation research has also been biased towards study in high-velocity markets of developed economies (see Aram & Walochik, 1996; Cunha, 2005). As a result, the drivers of improvisation in the different competitive settings of emerging economies remain unexplored. With higher levels of uncertainties than their peers in developed economies and greater frequency of surprising events, arising from rapid and chaotic environmental changes (Zheng & Mai, 2013) the apparent need for firms to adapt to their environment gives rise to our research question: what drives organisational improvisation in an emerging economy under conditions of turbulence?

Focusing on this research question, we argue that managerial and organisational characteristics directly affect organisational improvisation, and also competitive turbulence impacts the relationships between different internal characteristics and improvisation in different ways. This article thus responds to calls for research issued by Nemkova et al. (2012) for study into the antecedents of improvisation, and by Kyriakopoulos (2011) and Wright, Filatotchev, Hoskisson, & Peng (2005) to extend the study of strategy and organisations to a wider range of settings to examine the extent to which theories in developed economies are suited to the characteristics and actions of firms in emerging economies.