Although the very notion of environmental complexity implies a degree of task difficulty that is likely to create severe coordination problems for an organization, it is possible that there are benefits associated with low-to-moderate levels of heterogeneity and dispersion. For instance, a diverse and dispersed client base may prompt organizations to more effectively tailor the services that they provide to clients’ requirements. However, it is likely that beyond a certain point these pressures towards enhancing the customer focus of an organization will prove overwhelming, as the resources required to maintain client responsiveness outstrip any potential benefits garnered from specialisation. This curvilinear pattern may be especially likely to apply to the subjective environment. Managerial perceptions of the heterogeneity of the needs, demands and dispersion of clients may be much more nuanced than the relative levels of complexity revealed by archival measures. For example, managers’ views on the circumstances they face often reflect a deep understanding of service users’ widely differing needs, the competing values held by external stakeholders (Quinn andRohrbaugh 1981), and the problems associated with the “goal ambiguity” that both of these cause (Chun and Rainey 2005). “Realistic” assessments of moderate levels of complexity may therefore be particularly likely to result in service improvement, but again may be unlikely to enable organizations to overcome the pressures that are associated with extremely high levels of heterogeneity and dispersion, making it likely that environmental complexity will exhibit either a negative linear relationship with performance or an inverted u-shaped one.