Charting Research Directions in Organizational Agility: Reconceptualizing the Agility Construct for Systematic Theory Development and Cumulative Empirical Inquiry

Concern for organizational agility has grown exponentially over the past four decades. Concurrently, a clear conceptualization of organizational agility, its properties, dimensions, and antecedents has eluded researchers. Because of this lack of clarity, the conceptual and methodical study of agility has remained fragmented and lacking in cumulative insights. We sift through the accounts of organizational agility in several management disciplines to build a systematic foundation for an agility construct that clearly defines its foundational dimensions—speed and flexibility—and their tension-filled relationship. The proposed conceptualization treats agility as an organizationallevel capacity to produce intended change along two dimensions posited to be in tension: (1) the magnitude of variety change and (2) the rate of variety change. We define an organization as agile when it has the capacity to move with greater flexibility, higher speed, or both relative to its competitors. We describe movement in this context as a function of observations of the firm’s consecutive sense–response pairs. Using a bidimensional space defined by the magnitude (y-axis) and rate (x-axis) of variety change, we distinguish three types of movements typical for agile organizations: (1) focusing on either flexibility or speed as a dominant response, (2) oscillating between flexibility and speed but being constrained by limits created by magnitude–rate tradeoffs, and (3) breaking through magnitude–rate tradeoffs to simultaneously increase both flexibility and speed. In conclusion, we formulate a typology of agile organizations. Together, the proposed relationships lay the foundation for the development of a middle-range theory of organizational agility.