Testing the Nomological Relationships of a General Team Agility Framework

Team agility is a popular managerial practice describing a team’s ability to quickly and flexibly respond to uncertainty and changes from environmental, client, and project demands. However, most team agility measures are industry-specific and fail to capture its key features. To address this, we created a team agility framework that is applicable to most work and team contexts, consisting of six features. We test this examine the framework’s relationship with relevant antecedents (empowering leadership, team co-operation, team task conflict) and outcomes (team performance, work engagement).

The authors examined hypotheses using cross-sectional, multilevel, and two-wave approaches. Our total sample of n = 884 consisted of unique participants across two separate studies (Study 1 n = 591; Study 2 n = 293) and across a variety of professional industries and all participants worked in teams. Hypotheses were tested using Mplus.

Findings show that team agility is positively related to team performance and work engagement across several samples. Empowering leadership was significantly positively related to team agility in the cross-sectional and multi-wave samples. Team co-operation and task conflict were positively associated in cross-sectional analyses.

We extend theoretical and empirical understanding of team agility and provide a team agility framework that can be used by practitioners and researchers across most contexts.

We identify several team and leader antecedents that promote team agility, which practitioners can examine and promote in real life teams, who are seeking to be more agile and adaptive, while also considering implementing formal agile working. Moreover, our framework can be used in most organisational settings and can facilitate comparison across teams.