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Agile software development helps software producing organizations to respond to manifold challenges. While prior research focused on agility as a project or process phenomenon, the authors suggest that agility is an emergent phenomenon on the team level. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

Using the theory of complex adaptive systems (CASs), the study captures the multiple influencing levels of software development teams (SDTs) and their interplay with self-organization and emergence. The authors investigate three agile SDTs in different contextual environments that participate with four or more different roles each.

The results suggest self-organization as a central process when understanding team agility. While contextual factors often provide restriction on self-organization, they can help the team to enhance its autonomy.

The theoretical contributions result from the development and test of theory grounded propositions and the investigation of mature agile development teams.

The findings help practitioners to improve the cost-effectiveness ratio of their team’s operations.

The study provides empirical evidence for the emergence of team agility in agile SDTs. Using the lens of CAS, the study suggests the importance of the team’s autonomy.

Organizational agility is becoming a critical component of organization development and change due to the increasingly continuous and iterative nature of change. This explanatory mixed methods study demonstrates the effect of collective thriving on change agility and positions collective thriving as a psychological state that contributes to organization agility. Attunement is hypothesized to be a point of leverage to increase the state of collective thriving and was found to moderate the relationship between collective thriving and change agility. The qualitative study investigates characteristics of high- and low-thriving teams and furthers the understanding of collective thriving and change agility.

The environment in which businesses operate today is uncertain, chaotic, and changing at a more rapid pace than ever before. In this new dynamic world, current approaches to organizational design and processes are not as effective as they have been. Recent research has provided insight into organizational agility as a method to help organizations survive and thrive in these environments. A divergent body of literature is presented that explores agility, learning, and thriving. An exploratory mixed-methods study was conducted at the team level to examine the relationship between these constructs as well as their relationship to performance. Based on the results, we present a series of propositions for future research and provide an illustration of the Components of Agile and Thriving teams to be used as its foundation. The discussion serves to synthesize these initial findings and provide both implications for practice as well as theory.

To facilitate innovative software development, more and more software development teams (SDTs) turn to agile methods. Such agile methods develop both extensive and efficient software responses to a client’s requirement change. However, the antecedents of successful agile software development are poorly understood. The authors goal is to propose a model of how power asymmetry and paradoxical leadership interact and affect agility in SDTs, which in turn affect their capacity to innovate. By leveraging insights from research on individuals’ cognition, the authors argue that developers with relatively higher power evaluate their contributions to their teams more ambivalently, which increases their delay or postponement of their contributions to their teams’ tasks. As a result, power asymmetry is negatively related to software teams’ response extensiveness and efficiency. Second, and drawing on leadership studies on behavioral complexity, the authors consider the moderating role of paradoxical leadership that a team receives as an important moderating factor to this effect. The authors argue that, when team leaders exhibit paradoxical leadership behaviors, high-power individuals’ ambivalence is less likely to emerge; hence, transforming power asymmetry to an asset for the enhancement of agility in the SDT.

While agile methods have been adapted to different industries, agility depends on the alignment between the practices and project environment. Nevertheless, it is unlikely to find the best combination without a diagnosis of these variables. This paper proposes a project management agility diagnostic tool (PM/ADT), aimed at diagnosing the project environment, management practices and agility performance to find the right balance between them.

The tool was developed by combining multiple techniques during a three-year research program, including an extensive systematic literature review, exploratory case studies, a survey and three case studies involving 25 projects from information and communications technology, software development and technology-based companies.

The results indicate potential discrepancies between environmental factors, management practices and agility performance that affect project management in organizations, allowing the diagnosis and analysis of the situation for the development of better management solutions.

The study reinforces the hypothesis that it may not be possible to adopt pure agile models or methods in most projects, except in specific cases, as with some projects in the software industry. This is in line with the hybrid models. However, further testing is needed with a larger sample of projects and organizations.

The tool can be useful to assess different types of projects from different industry sectors to improve the management process, allowing the development of agility beyond the software industry.

The article discusses agility beyond measurement, assessing the most appropriate environment for using practices from one approach or another.

This chapter describes the change efforts and action research projects at a Dutch multinational which, over a period of 25 years, produced in one of its businesses a zigzag path toward collaborative leadership dynamics at the horizontal and vertical interfaces. The chapter also identifies the learning mechanisms that helped achieve this transformation. Changing the patterns at the vertical interfaces proved to be a most tricky, complex, and confusing operation. The data show that organizations need hierarchical interfaces between levels, but are hindered by the hierarchical leadership dynamics at these interfaces. The data furthermore show that competitive performance requires more than redesigning horizontal interfaces. A business can only respond with speed and flexibility to threats and opportunities in the external environment when the leadership dynamics at agility-critical vertical interfaces are also changed.

Recognizing that very less number of research has been conducted on workforce agility, the current research aimed to examine the impact of organizational practices in the form of organizational learning and training, compensation, involvement, team work and information system (IS) on workforce agility. Influenced by the “Black Box” approach, the study also examined the role of psychological empowerment as a mechanism mediating the relationship between organizational practices and workforce agility.

The study has been conducted in selective Indian industries, representing manufacturing and service sector across public and private sectors. Quantitative and qualitative data have been collected from both executives and non-executives through reliable instruments validated in Indian context. Data have been analyzed using descriptive analysis, canonical correlation analysis and multiple regression.

Findings that organizational practices significantly related to workforce agility prove that organizational practices are capable of improving the agile attributes and behavior of the workforce. In detail, team work has the greatest influence on workforce agility, followed by Reward system, employee involvement, organizational learning and training and ISs. Further, the study result also proved the mediating role of psychological empowerment between organizational practices and workforce agility.

Organizations are to design practices related to organizational learning and training, compensation, involvement, team work and IS and implement them efficiently and effectively to enable agility within the workforce, as an agile workforce can only respond proactively to a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous business environment. Further, the result also suggests that managers should design the organizational practices capable of enhancing psychological empowerment, as the combination can deliver better workforce agility.

The research is useful considering very less number of research on workforce agility.

In today’s constantly evolving global business environment, multidivisional firms (MDFs) require an organizational structure for supply chain management (SCM) that facilitates the development of supply chain agility. This research aims to investigate what structural elements of an MDF’s SCM team contribute to supply chain agility.

A two-sample field study was conducted. Four MDFs with top-performing supply chains (Sample 1) were first studied to identify agility-supporting structural elements. Then, quantitative data from 35 MDFs with contrasting levels of supply chain agility (Sample 2) were collected to test the theoretical propositions advanced from Sample 1 findings.

The results reveal four structural elements that exert a positive impact on an MDF’s supply chain agility: hierarchical position of the divisional top supply chain executive, scope of divisional supply chain operations, hierarchical position of the top supply chain executive at the headquarters and scope of SCM coordination by the headquarters.

First, this study provides a comparatively comprehensive understanding of the SCM organization structure in MDFs. Second, this study is one of the first to provide empirically supported theoretical insights about the linkage between an MDF’s organizational structure for SCM and supply chain agility.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the baseline model required to measure whole-of-organisation agility within a university information services division. The paper seeks to analyse the process of identifying and applying such a model.

The qualitative methodology applied is that of a single case study. The organisation analysed was an Australian university’s information services division. A structured survey, based on Wendler (2014), was administered to all staff as part of a multi-phased approach, thus facilitating a triangulation process.

The current research has confirmed the applicability of Wendler’s model to the higher education information technology sector. Application of the model establishes not only a baseline agility maturity score across the whole-of-organisation but also provides granular scores based on organisational units. Triangulation of survey results is recommended to achieve a more in-depth perspective.

Further research comparing similarly and differently sized universities could provide valuable insights. More research is needed to extend the applicability of Wendler’s model to a wider range of domains and industries.

The grouping of survey questions under particular broad themes reflected the strategic focus of the division being surveyed. Organisations implementing the proposed model will need to select themes that correspond with their respective strategic goals and culture.

The paper has extended the research and resultant model developed by Wendler by applying them not only to both managers and staff but also to a different domain, specifically higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to identify and analyze the interactions among different readiness factors for implementing agility in healthcare organization. Total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) based readiness framework for agility has been developed to understand the mutual interactions among the factors and to identify the driving and dependence power of these factors.

The identification of factors is done by TISM approach used for analyzing the mutual interactions between factors. Cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification analysis is utilized to find the driving and dependent factors of agile readiness in healthcare.

This paper identifies 12 factors of readiness for change in literature review, which is followed by an expert interview to understand the interconnection of factors and to study interrelationships of factors. The study suggests that factors like environmental scanning, resource availability, innovativeness, cost effectiveness, organizational leadership, training and development are important for implementing/improving the readiness of agility in healthcare organizations.

This research focuses mainly on readiness factors for agility in healthcare sector.

Top management must stress on readiness factors that have a strong driving power for efficient implementation of agility in healthcare. This study helps the managers to take quick decisions, and continuous monitoring of readiness factors would be more beneficial to improve the quality of service, which makes the organization more agile.

In this research, TISM-based readiness for agile framework structural model has been proposed for healthcare organizations, which is a new effort for implementation of agility in healthcare.