Development of a behavioral taxonomy of agility in the workplace

Abstract

PurposeThe concept of workforce agility has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, defining it has sparked much discussion and ambiguity. Recognizing this ambiguity, this paper aims to inductively develop a behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility.Design/methodology/approachThe authors interviewed 36 experts in the field of agility and used concept mapping and the critical incident technique to create a behavioral taxonomy.FindingsThe authors identified a behavioral taxonomy consisting of ten dimensions: (1) accepting changes, (2) decision making, (3) creating transparency, (4) collaboration, (5) reflection, (6) user centricity, (7) iteration, (8) testing, (9) self-organization, and (10) learning.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors’ research contributes to the literature in that it offers an inductively developed behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility with ten dimensions. It further adds to the literature by tying the notion of workforce agility to the performance literature.Practical implicationsThe authors’ results suggest that it might be beneficial for companies to take all workforce agility dimensions into account when creating an agile culture, starting agile projects, integrating agility into hiring decisions or evaluating employee performance.Originality/valueThis paper uses an inductive approach to define workforce agility as a set of behavioral dimensions, integrating the scientific as well as the practitioner literature on agility.

Relationships between Agile Work Practices and Occupational Well-Being: The Role of Job Demands and Resources

“…Team self-organization means that agile teams autonomously coordinate their own work and regulate their own boundary conditions, and that team members share leadership and decision authority [31]. This includes the commitment and willingness of team members to manage, structure, and organize themselves [3]. Agile project teams can freely choose tools and technologies as needed, and they can make personnel decisions as well as decisions about how to handle changes of user requirements on their own [32].…”

“…Agile teams follow a process of incremental planning and delivery, aiming to deliver a potentially working product increment after each iteration to receive immediate feedback [12]. Projects are developed in a stepwise manner to achieve continuous improvements [3]. Furthermore, the work performed during each cycle is strictly defined so that major tasks need to be split into smaller components to fit with the length of the cycle [32].…”

“…Reflection is another key dimension of agility. Agile teams regularly question their behavior, reflect on their collaboration, and look for improvements in their work [3]. This reflection is usually done in regularly scheduled retrospective sessions in which the team looks back at the last iteration.…”

“…Only in this way can it be guaranteed that the results of different studies can be compared and integrated. With the systematic elaboration of a behavioral taxonomy of agility, researchers have already provided a starting point to develop a unified instrument with regards to workforce agility [3,90]. Moreover, it is not necessarily the case that the same results can be replicated for the agile work practices we have not included.…”

“…Organizations recognize the need to implement agility in their structures and processes to keep pace with today's complex, challenging, and competitive business environment [2]. Some key characteristics of agile work include self-organized teams, quick and proactive decisionmaking, transparency, collaboration, regular reflection within the team, customer centricity, and an iterative work approach [3]. Agile work practices were first established in software development to better meet customers' requirements and to increase productivity and quality.…”