Organizational agility: Exploring impact of adoption on team performance from the human resource perspective

How organizations deal with unpredictability and ever changing business environments continues to be a dominant topic for human resource and business leaders. This exploratory qualitative inquiry was conducted utilizing individual, in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 15 volunteer participants. The primary research question was: What is the human resource professionals' perspective of the adoption of organizational agility characteristics, flexibility and responsiveness, on work team performance? The research participants described a high-performing team as one that is a strong performer with high achieving team members who do what they do best and execute at a high level. The team has clearly articulated and is aligned on team purpose and goal(s). The team is aware of and capitalizes on the strengths of other team members and finally, the team has mutual trust. An agile organization was described by participants as one that is flexible to meet the requirements of the team and organization and embraces change, which is happing all of the time. A lack of trust was clearly represented as an attribute which would keep a team from becoming high-performing. Finally, flexibility was an emergent theme when describing an agile organization but was not an emergent theme when participants were asked to describe a high-performing team. The agile characteristic of responsiveness did not surface as an emergent theme in the data representing characteristics of a high-performing team or characteristics describing an agile organization. The findings of this study address challenges for human resource professionals transforming organizations in response to today's changing business environment with organizational agility as a core differentiator.