Customer agility and firm performance in the tourism industry

Abstract

The growing importance of agility in any business process is universally accepted and extensively investigated in different disciplines. However, lacking empirical pieces of evidence for the suggested theoretical framework of agility hinders its application in the practices. Thus, this study attempts to address this issue by empirically testing a framework of customer agility’s antecedents and consequences using the tourism industry context. The framework is tested on data collected from 231 Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the tourism industry in Vietnam and analyzed using Partial Least Square Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Findings suggest that not all attributes of customer agility exert positive impacts on the firm’s performance and human factors are posited as the most important antecedents for organizational agility. A number of practical implications are also suggested from the research findings