Understanding organizational agility: a work-design perspective
Abstract
This paper introduces a unified theoretical model of organizational agility and investigates the attributes of knowledge-intensive work-design systems, which contribute to achieving and sustaining organizational agility. Even though there has been considerable research on the topic of agility, these studies are not unified regarding their conceptualizations of agility and/or tend to adopt fairly limited views of agility dimensionality. Here, we organize a review of existing definitions and conceptual models of organizational agility, and proceed to advance a relatively comprehensive model built from a work-design perspective. This new model offers a theoretical platform for understanding organizational agility. This paper further investigates those attributes of a work design system that contribute to organizational agility. A knowledge-intensive work-design system is an example of an edge organization. Its governance mechanism (participant engagement governance, network governance, and system dynamic governance) involves three work-design levels: strategic, operational and episodic. We contend that an entrepreneurial governance pattern has attributes contributing to organizational agility, whereby the impetus for its work-design efforts stem not from some deep hierarchical authority pattern, but rather is distributed among participants and through their networking dynamics. These attributes allow each participant positioned at the edge of the system to stay alert and respond to environing trends and forces, on behalf of the system and in concert with the system. Result of an illustrative case study are reported.
Rights
This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Maximizing agility envelopes for reaction wheel spacecraft
Karpenko, Mark; King, Jeffery T. (SAGE, 2018);Spacecraft agility is limited by the maximum torque that reaction wheels can provide. Therefore, a reaction wheel array is typically configured to maximize the inscribed sphere of the reaction wheel torque envelope. Agility ... -
Agility Analysis of the James Webb Space Telescope
Karpenko, Mark; King, Jeffrey T.; Dennehy, Cornelius J.; Ross, I. Michael (AIAA, 2019-04);The agility of a rigid-body spacecraft can be expressed in terms of a geometric, three-dimensional, solid called the agilitoid. Originally developed as a means for explaining the concept of “hidden agility” made visible ... -
Entropy and self organizing in edge organizations
Jin, Yan; Liu, Qianyu (2009-06);Along with the advance of technologies and evolving variety of military missions, Edge Organization has been proposed to transform C2 from its conventional hierarchical and inflexible structures into more network centric ...