**3. Process management: A concept and its scope**

It is widely acknowledged that efficient and effective process management improves organizational dynamism, readiness, and reactiveness capability to challenges [24–27]. Scholars including Wagner and Patzak argue that leading companies without PM are no longer imaginable [28].

While its main objective is to increase efficiency and effectiveness, the understanding of the concept in both theory and practice revealed a mutual contradiction in some aspects along the years [29]. If not addressed adequately such inconsistencies may harm the very notion of PM by leaving gaps in the understanding and practice of PM. Therefore, the need to engage scholars and practitioners to address the inconsistencies in the understanding and practice of PM within the context of the twenty-first century.

Paim and Flexa conceptualize PM as "a coordinated set of permanent tasks required to design processes and assure they function properly and to foster processrelated learning" [30]. Evidently, PM is all about aligning processes with the strategic goals of an organization. In this respect, business process management (BPM) has been the focus of many studies over several decades restricting the very concept of PM to business only. Moreover, the scope of PM in this study goes beyond business. It is broader involving both for-profit and not-for-profit organizations.

Research reveals that the call for the shift or integration between the traditional functional management model with the famous "business process management" approach has proved challenging [31]. However, the lack of a universally accepted definition of BPM does not stop scholars and practitioners from attaching connotations to it. Significantly, people involvement through the leadership of the line managers is the most important component that BPM offers to process management favoring the organic approach to management [32].

To this effect, Kohlbacher stresses that BPM goes beyond designing, developing, and executing business processes. It promotes interaction between these processes, managing and analyzing, and optimizing them [33]. On this basis, literature considers

**Figure 1.** *PM tasks.* the following as tasks associated with process management: the design, monitoring, control, and correction of processes, and the promotion of process-related learning in organizations [24, 30, 34, 35]. These tasks are summed up in **Figure 1**.
