Development of a behavioral taxonomy of agility in the workplace

Abstract

Purpose

The 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/approach

The authors interviewed 36 experts in the field of agility and used concept mapping and the critical incident technique to create a behavioral taxonomy.

Findings

The 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/implications

The 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 implications

The 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/value

This 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.

Citation

Petermann, M.K.H. and Zacher, H. (2021), "Development of a behavioral taxonomy of agility in the workplace", International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, Vol. 14 No. 6, pp. 1383-1405. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-02-2021-0051