Learning more from crossing levels: Investigating agility at three levels of the organization
This work addresses the challenge for organizations seeking to build agile teams by providing a more comprehensive approach, though it is incremental as it builds on existing organizational science without introducing new methods.
The paper tackles the problem of understanding organizational agility by arguing that current research is limited to single-level analysis, and proposes a multi-level framework combining macro (organizational), meso (team), and micro (individual) perspectives to develop actionable guidelines for practitioners.
Scholars have tried to explain how organizations can build agile teams by only looking at one level of analysis. We argue in this short paper that lessons can be learned from organizational science results explaining variance on three different abstraction levels of organizations. We suggest agility needs to be explained from organizational (macro), the team (meso), and individual (micro) levels to provide useful and actionable guidelines to practitioners. We are currently designing such studies and hope that they will eventually result in validated measurements that can be used to prevent companies from investing in the wrong areas when trying to move towards more agility.