PurposeThe 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/approachThe authors interviewed 36 experts in the field of agility and used concept mapping and the critical incident technique to create a behavioral taxonomy.FindingsThe 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/implicationsThe 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 implicationsThe 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/valueThis 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.

Over the last few years, the concept of agility has become increasingly popular in organizations. Companies are hoping to foster speed, adaptability, and innovation by rolling out an agile strategy, implementing agile methods, and creating an agile mind-set among leaders and employees. There is, however, much ambiguity about what the concept of agility entails and how it can be successfully implemented in an organization. The purpose of this practice-focused paper is to organize the extant agility literature for readers by giving an overview of different definitions of agility; outlining evidence-based factors that contribute to agility at the individual, team, and organizational levels; and describing three practical examples at a large German car company. Finally, the authors suggest steps that organizations can take to increase agility in their workforce.

The concept of workforce agility has become increasingly popular in recent years as agile individuals are expected to be better able to handle change and uncertainty. However, agility has rarely been studied in a systematic way. Relations between agility and positive work outcomes, such as higher performance or increased well-being, have often been suggested but rarely been empirically tested. Furthermore, several different workforce agility measures are used in the literature which complicates the comparison of findings. Recognizing these gaps in the literature, we developed a new workforce agility measure, compared this measure to established workforce agility measures, and empirically tested the relations of workforce agility with work outcomes. For this purpose, we surveyed participants from two samples (N1 = 218, N2 = 533). In a first step, we used Sample 1 to examine the factor structure of the measure for item selection. In a second step, we used Sample 2 to confirm the 10-factor structure and to compare the predictive validity of our measure along with two other agility measures. Findings demonstrate predictive validity for all three workforce agility scales, especially in relation to innovative performance. Furthermore, workforce agility related positively to task and innovative performance, organizational citizenship behavior, job satisfaction, and well-being.