Keywords
Business management
Systems theory
Innovation
Leadership
Decision-making
How to Cite
Abstract
This article aims to propose an integrative theoretical framework explaining organizational evolution as a dynamic spiral process. The proposal does not gather three juxtaposed factors: it articulates them into a chain, in which deliberate action produces the experience that is learned from, cumulative learning renews the reasons that sustain organizational commitment, and that commitment sets the intentionality of the action opening the following cycle. This chaining, and not the sum of its components, steers the ascending or descending trajectory of the evolutionary cycle. A theoretical reflection article was developed through an integrative literature review using abductive reasoning, on a corpus of 32 sources retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, SciELO and Google Scholar; 17 of them published between 2020 and 2026. Categories were obtained through thematic coding and tested for internal coherence and external pertinence. As a result, the organizational maturity spiral model is proposed, with five levels of development: survival (N1), stability (N2), optimization (N3), expansion (N4), and transcendence (N5). Each level is defined by the simultaneous state of the three vectors, with observable indicators and conditions for ascent and descent. It is concluded that the spiral describes, in structural terms and still without empirical validation, how organizations accumulate or dissipate adaptive capacity: since the vectors form a chain, disconnecting any one of them is enough to reverse the ascending trajectory. The formulation operates at the organizational level.
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