Establishing the Foundations to Measure Organizational Agility for Military Organizations

Abstract

There is an ongoing demand for organizations to become more agile in order to prosper amongst their competitors. Many military organizations have declared a renewed focus towards organizational agility. The goal of this research is to isolate the variables needed to measure organizational agility (OA) in military organizations, allowing for the future development of a suitable method to measure OA without the need to interact with outside organizations. This article begins by providing a suitable and formal definition of organizational agility by exploring and analyzing relevant scholarly literature on the subject. Related terms, such as organizational resiliency, flexibility, robustness, versatility, and adaptability are also explored to examine their definition boundaries and any overlapping areas. Existing methods to measure organizational agility are examined and summarized, and the current limitations to their application are highlighted. Previous studies to find characteristics associated with organizational agility were also examined, and an initial set of 88 organizational agility characteristics was built. Since these included possible redundant or overlapping characteristics, the Q-sort method was employed to discover, analyze, and eliminate redundant items from the dataset, ultimately resulting in 64 unique characteristics. The result is a suitable definition for organization agility applicable to military organizations and a list of potential associated characteristics that summarizes related research to date. This groundwork establishes the foundation to conduct a multi-organization study to further refine the characteristic list and ultimately develop a method to measure organizational agility.