In a modern business environment, organisations are facing the need to be flexible. The requirement for flexibility appears in many forms – organisations need to adapt both what they do and how they do it, both temporarily and permanently, in both foreseeable and unforeseeable circumstances. Business process orientation and business process management (BPM) have recently been some of the core paradigms within organisational management, and have gained recognition as ways of improving the organisational performance. However, it has been unclear how well the traditional BPM methods comply with the requirements of flexibility. This exploratory literature review has two goals. First, it investigates the diversity of business process and business environment characteristics, specifically in terms of the need for flexibility. Second, flexibility related issues relevant to the different levels of management (strategic, structural and operational level) are investigated. The study concludes that the need for flexibility has to be a factor in the selection of managerial approaches for the different types of business processes. Further, some of the BPM concepts available for facilitating process flexibility at different levels of management are introduced.