Impact of Team Agility on Team Effectiveness: The Role of Shared Mental Models, Team Empowerment, and Team Reflexivity

While more and more organizations are adopting team agility as a new work approach to cope better with change, research still lacks a proper understanding of the human-side of team agility. To investigate the effectiveness and the human-side of team agility, this study builds on the IMO-framework. Team agility is investigated as the input factor, shared mental models (SMM) and team empowerment as mediators, team performance and team satisfaction as outcomes and team reflexivity as moderator between the relationships of mediators and outcomes. Data was collected from 23 agile working teams (− = 3.48). Using linear regression both hypotheses, that team agility positively impacts SMM and team empowerment, were supported. This study found a significant total model effect for the relationship between team agility and team performance mediated by both, SMM and team empowerment. This study contributes to a better integration of the agile and teamwork literatures by identifying the roles of SMM and team empowerment on team effectiveness in an organizational context of team agility, as facilitating emergent team states. Keywords: Agile work; team agility; team effectiveness; shared mental models; team empowerment.While more and more organizations are adopting team agility as a new work approach to cope better with change, research still lacks a proper understanding of the human-side of team agility. To investigate the effectiveness and the human-side of team agility, this study builds on the IMO-framework. Team agility is investigated as the input factor, shared mental models (SMM) and team empowerment as mediators, team performance and team satisfaction as outcomes and team reflexivity as moderator between the relationships of mediators and outcomes. Data was collected from 23 agile working teams (− = 3.48). Using linear regression both hypotheses, that team agility positively impacts SMM and team empowerment, were supported. This study found a significant total model effect for the relationship between team agility and team performance mediated by both, SMM and team empowerment. This study contributes to a better integration of the agile and teamwork literatures by identifying the roles of SMM and team empowerment on team effectiveness in an organizational context of team agility, as facilitating emergent team states. Keywords: Agile work; team agility; team effectiveness; shared mental models; team empowerment

Organizational agility and HRM strategy: Do they really enhance firms' competitiveness?

This article intended to emphasize and explicate the conceptual framework of organizational agility that discusses organizational spirit, capability, flexibility, nimbleness, and speediness. Whereas, the key activities of HR specialists involved in operational matters are progressively observed as a source of competitive advantage in today's severely competitive and fast changing markets. Similarly, it has been a competitive marketplace expansion; thus, nowadays, the situation is really difficult to enhance sustainable growth for the firms' side. Hence, the purpose of this article is to reveal that HR strategy enables organizations or firms to understand the value of internal and external customers, knowledge of competitors, products, technology, and sources of competitive advantage. It is all important to ascertain that the success of a business is founded along the belief that an organization achieve competitive advantage by making use of its people adequately and efficiently. Therefore, this article exemplifies some research propositions that how firms can respond rapidly and flexibly to the changing environment without facing market turbulence. Following this, the research aims to understand whether organizational agility and value of HR can really create a difference and influence on business performance. Finally, the result of this study highlights the importance of organizational agility and human resource's effectiveness which have an influence on enhancing organizational performance and competitive abilities. (C) AIMI Journal

Execution: the Critical “What’s Next?” in Strategic Human Resource Management

The Human Resource Planning Society’s 1999 State of the Art/Practice (SOTA/P) study was conducted by a virtual team of researchers who interviewed and surveyed 232 human resource and line executives, consultants, and academics worldwide. Looking three to five years ahead, the study probed four basic topics: (1) major emerging trends in external environments, (2) essential organizational capabilities, (3) critical people issues, and (4) the evolving role of the human resource function. This article briefly reports some of the study’s major findings, along with an implied action agenda – the “gotta do’s for the leading edge. Cutting through the complexity, the general tone is one of urgency emanating from the intersection of several underlying themes: the increasing fierceness of competition, the rapid and unrelenting pace of change, the imperatives of marketplace and thus organizational agility, and the corresponding need to buck prevailing trends by attracting and, especially, retaining and capturing the commitment of world-class talent. While it all adds up to a golden opportunity for human resource functions, there is a clear need to get to get on with it – to get better, faster, and smarter – or run the risk of being left in the proverbial dust. Execute or be executed

Dynamic Organizations: Achieving Marketplace Agility Through Workforce Scalability

Dynamic organizations (DOs) operate in business environments characterized by frequent and discontinuous change, They compete on the basis of marketplace agility; that is on their ability to generate a steady stream of both large and small innovations in products, services, solutions, business models, and even internal processes that enable them to leapfrog and outmaneuver current and would-be competitors and thus eke out a series of temporary competitive advantages that might, with luck, add up to sustained success over time. Marketplace agility requires the ongoing reallocation of resources, including human resources. We use the term workforce scalability to capture the capacity of an organization to keep its human resources aligned with business needs by transitioning quickly and easily from one human resource configuration to another and another, ad infinitum. We argue that marketplace agility is enhanced by workforce agility because it is likely to meet the four necessary and sufficient conditions postulated by the resource based view (RBV) of the firm – valuable, rare, inimitable, and non-substitutable – if it can be attained. Our analysis therefore concludes by focusing on the two dimensions of workforce scalability – alignment and fluidity – and postulating a number of principles that might be used to guide the design of an HR strategy that enhances both. Throughout the paper, key concepts are illustrated using the experiences of Google, the well-known Internet search firm. Because the analysis is speculative and intended primarily to pique the interest of researchers and practitioners, the paper ends with a number of important questions that remain to be clarified

Achieving Marketplace Agility Through Human Resource Scalability

[Excerpt] Increasingly, firms find themselves, either by circumstances or choice, operating in highly turbulent business environments. For them, competitiveness is a constantly moving target. Many, it appears, are satisfied to enjoin the struggle with patched up business models and warmed over bureaucracies. But some, convinced that this is a losing proposition, are aggressively exploring and even experimenting with alternative frameworks and approaches. The monikers are many -- kinetic (Fradette and Michaud, 1998), dynamic (Peterson and Mannix, 2003), resilient (Hamel and Valikangas, 2003) and our favorite, agile (Shafer, Dyer, Kilty, Ericksen and Amos, 2001) -- but the aim is the same: to create organizations where change is the natural state of affairs. Clearly, this quest poses a number of major challenges for our field (Dyer and Shafer, 1999, 2003), one of which, optimizing human resource scalability, is the subject of this essay

Crafting A Human Resource Strategy To Foster Organizational Agility: A Case Study

A decade ago, the CEO of Albert Einstein Healthcare Network (AEHN), anticipating a tumultuous and largely unpredictable period in its industry, undertook to convert this organization from one that was basically stable and complacent to one that was agile, “nimble, and change-hardy”. This case study briefly addresses AEHN’s approaches to business strategy and organization design, but focuses primarily on the human resource strategy that emerged over time to foster the successful attainment of organizational agility. Although exploratory, the study suggests a number of lessons for those who are, or will be, studying or trying to create and sustain this promising new organizational paradigm

Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

People in the E-Business: New Challenges, New Solutions

[Excerpt] Human Resource Planning Society’s (HRPS) annual State of the Art/Practice (SOTA/P) study has become an integral contributor to HRPS’s mission of providing leading edge thinking to its members. Past efforts conducted in 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, and 1999 have focused on identifying the issues on the horizon that will have a significant impact on the field of Human Resources (HR). This year, in a divergence from past practice, the SOTA/P effort aimed at developing a deeper understanding of one critical issue having a profound impact on organizations and HR, the rise of e-business. The rise of e-business has been both rapid and dramatic. One estimate puts the rate of adoption of the internet at 4,000 new users each hour (eMarketer, 1999) resulting in the expectation of 250 million people on line by the end of 2000, and 350 million by 2005 (Nua, 1999). E-commerce is expected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2003, and of that, 87 percent will go to the business to business (B2B) and 13 percent to the business to consumer (B2C) segments, respectively (Plumely, 2000)

Artificial Intelligence for the Financial Services Industry: What Challenges Organizations to Succeed?

As a research field, artificial intelligence (AI) exists for several years. More recently, technological breakthroughs, coupled with the fast availability of data, have brought AI closer to commercial use. Internet giants such as Google, Amazon, Apple or Facebook invest significantly into AI, thereby underlining its relevance for business models worldwide. For the highly data driven finance industry, AI is of intensive interest within pilot projects, still, few AI applications have been implemented so far. This study analyzes drivers and inhibitors of a successful AI application in the finance industry based on panel data comprising 22 semi-structured interviews with experts in AI in finance. As theoretical lens, we structured our results using the TOE framework. Guidelines for applying AI successfully reveal AI-specific role models and process competencies as crucial, before trained algorithms will have reached a quality level on which AI applications will operate without human intervention and moral concerns

Agile methods for agile universities

We explore a term, Agile, that is being used in various workplace settings, including the management of universities. The term may have several related but slightly different meanings. Agile is often used in the context of facilitating more creative problem-solving and advocating for the adoption, design, tailoring and continual updating of more innovative organizational processes. We consider a particular set of meanings of the term from the world of software development. Agile methods were created to address certain problems with the software development process. Many of those problems have interesting analogues in the context of universities, so a reflection on agile methods may be a useful heuristic for generating ideas for enabling universities to be more creative