In this work we discuss the forms of monotonicity that have been recently introduced to relax the monotonicity condition in the definition of aggregation functions. We focus on directional, ordered directional and strengthened ordered directional monotonicity, study their main properties and provide some results about their links and relations among them. We also present two families of functions, the so-called linear fusion functions and ordered linear fusion functions and we study the set of directions for which these types of functions are directionally, ordered directionally and strengthened ordered directionally increasing. In particular, OWA operators are an example of ordered linear fusion functions.