What is it about?
Developing an agile workforce requires an understanding of the organization’s basic characteristics. Managers must then leverage the organizational practices that facilitate agility. At the same time, they must bear in mind that employee empowerment has been recognized as a facilitator of proactive behavior, such as flexibility, resilience, and persistence.
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Why is it important?
An agile organization, of course, requires an agile workforce.Recent research shows that manufacturing flexibility depends much more on people than on technologies and the ability of workers at various levels to communicate effectively. There is an absence of systematic studies on the concept of workforce agility, however. Research on agility has mainly focused on the operational perspectives of speed and flexibility. Little attention has been devoted to identifying the organizational characteristics that are conducive to the agile employee performance. When pinpointing the organizational practices that can promote workforce agility, the literature is largely limited to untested prescriptions.
Perspectives
Psychological empowerment in the form of intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy can produce proactive, adaptive, and resilience behavior among workers, thereby promoting workforce agility. Organizational learning and an organic structure characterized by decentralized decision-making, low formalization, and a flat structure also can promote workforce agility. To respond to the emergent informationsharing and collaboration requirements of an agile workforce, managers also need to ensure flexible IT infrastructures to support the rapid introduction of new systems.
Dr Ashutosh Muduli
Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Workforce agility: Examining the role of organizational practices and psychological empowerment, Global Business and Organizational Excellence, June 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/joe.21800.
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