Journal of Competences, Strategy & Management · 2021
What makes an organization agile, and why is using agile methods not the same as being able to adapt?
Renzl, B., Mahringer, C. A., Rost, M., & Scheible, L. (2021). Organizational agility: Current challenges and future opportunities. Journal of Competences, Strategy & Management, 11, 1–10. 10.25437/jcsm-vol11-51
Organizations increasingly operate in environments characterized by rapid, persistent, and unpredictable change. Organizational agility captures the ability to detect, respond to, and sometimes actively shape such change. It is therefore closely related to adaptability, flexibility, dynamic capabilities, strategic agility, organizational learning, and the broader problem of how organizations remain effective under uncertainty.
Yet research uses the term agility in very different ways. Some studies treat organizational agility as an organization-wide capability to adapt to environmental change. Others use agility to describe methods such as Scrum or extreme programming. Still others examine strategic agility, supply-chain agility, agile manufacturing, or the role of digital technologies in enabling adaptation. The paper argues that these distinctions matter because an organization can use agile methods without becoming organizationally agile, and it can be highly adaptive without using agile methods at all.
The paper asks: What are the central conceptual challenges in research on organizational agility, how can different theoretical perspectives help us understand the phenomenon, and which questions should future research address?
As an introduction to a special issue, the article combines conceptual synthesis with bibliometric analysis. It compares prominent definitions of organizational agility, uses bibliographic coupling of 717 articles to identify distinct scholarly communities working on agility, distinguishes organization-level agility from agile methods, and synthesizes capability, process, and microfoundational perspectives. This combination makes visible both the fragmentation of the field and opportunities for connecting research on strategy, organization, information systems, supply chains, innovation, and agile project management.
In this introduction to the special issue on organizational agility, we carve out central challenges in research on organizational agility. More specifically, we suggest that (a) scholars have used a variety of definitions of organizational agility, (b) the agility concept has evolved in different communities that lack joint knowledge development, and (c) the term agility has been used to refer to different empirical phenomena (i.e., methods versus capability of an organization). Rather than suggesting the unification of theoretical and methodological approaches, this special issue provides a forum to embrace different theoretical and empirical approaches to advance the understanding of organizational agility. The editorial provides an overview of the contributions in the special issue and carves out possible avenues for future research.
The paper clarifies what organizational agility means, where research on agility has become fragmented, and which conceptual distinctions are essential for understanding organizational adaptation.
Scrum, extreme programming, and other agile methods describe ways of organizing work. Organizational agility describes an organization’s capacity to adapt to dynamic environments. The two can reinforce each other, but neither guarantees the other. This distinction is especially important when organizations try to scale agile teams or assess whether an agile transformation actually improves adaptability.
A bibliometric coupling analysis of 717 articles identifies distinct research communities around supply-chain agility, agile manufacturing, agile software development, information technology, and related areas. These communities have developed specialized knowledge, but limited cross-fertilization makes it harder to build a cumulative understanding of organizational agility.
Dynamic-capability perspectives explain how organizations develop an ability to adapt. Process perspectives focus on how organizations become agile over time. Microfoundational perspectives examine the everyday actions, practices, leadership behaviors, routines, and learning processes through which agility is produced. Bringing these perspectives together opens a more dynamic view of organizational change.
The article provides a bridge across research on organizational agility, dynamic capabilities, strategic agility, agile software development, supply chains, organizational learning, routines, and microfoundations. It highlights the need to distinguish carefully between agility as an organization-level phenomenon and agility as a set of work methods, while still examining how the two may become connected.
It also identifies several directions for future research: how proactive market shaping relates to reactive adaptation, when agile methods contribute to organizational agility, how agility develops dynamically over time, how top-down structures and bottom-up actions interact, and how qualitative, quantitative, and digital-trace methods can be combined to study agility as an unfolding process.
Organizations should not evaluate agility simply by counting Scrum teams, agile ceremonies, or transformation initiatives. The more consequential question is whether the organization can sense changes, respond effectively, coordinate across teams, and adapt structures, capabilities, and practices as circumstances evolve.
Managers should therefore separate the adoption of agile methods from the broader goal of organizational adaptability. Scaling agile practices can contribute to agility when teams create coherence across the organization, but local agile methods can also coexist with an organization that remains slow or unable to respond to environmental change.
