Agility and Safety Performance among Nurses: The Mediating Role of Mindful Organizing

This study aimed to assess the impact of workforce agility on private hospital nursing staff’s safety behavior with the mediating role of mindful organizing. This study was cross-sectional. A self-administered questionnaire was used to collect data from 369 nursing staff. The structural equation modeling (SEM) technique was used to check the internal consistency, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and hypotheses testing. For mediation analysis, the bootstrapping technique was used. Our findings suggested that workforce agility is the possible predictor of mindful organizing, as all of these dimensions have a positive impact on mindful organizing. Reference to safety performance sub-dimensions, proactivity, adaptability, and resilience had a positive significant impact on (a) safety compliance, and proactivity had a positive impact on (b) safety participation. Further, mindful organizing was also found to be positively associated with safety performance. Evidence for mediation between workforce agility and safety performance was also observed. Proactivity, adaptability, and resilience can enhance safety performance for the nursing staff. Workforce agility can also help the organization to attain mindful organizing, which will help them to achieve operational excellence, whereas in the past, high-reliability organizations were mainly found practicing mindful organizing. This study demonstrated the key impact of workforce agility and mindful organizing on safety behaviors directly and indirectly.

The Effect of Employee Engagement and Job Satisfaction on Workforce Agility Through Talent Management in Public Transportation Companies

This study aimed to analyzed employee engagement and job satisfaction with workforce agility through talent management as a mediating variable. The object of research was carried out at one of the public transportation companies. The number of respondents was 100 people. This research is purposive because it is following the research needs. The analysis tool uses the Partial Least Square (PLS) method. It aims to analyze specifically the variables and indicators that affect workforce agility. The results showed that employee engagement and job satisfaction had a positive effect on workforce agility. The role of talent management as a mediating variable affects workforce agility. Organizations must maximize the role of talent management to prepare employee competencies according to business challenges. The implementation of employee engagement and job satisfaction will make employees more agile, responsive, and have high initiatives to generate business innovation. Job satisfaction is very much needed in maintaining performance stability. The business process is very dependent on how the role and involvement of employees in executing the business plan. The four variables explain that workforce agility makes employee responsiveness higher in advancing the company's business. Therefore, organizations must be responsive and adaptive in empowering human resources optimally

Drivers of workforce agility: a dynamic capability perspective

Purpose This paper aims to represent an exploration of drivers of workforce agility under the lens of dynamic capabilities to advance the existing workforce literature on agility and strategic human resource management. Design/methodology/approach In-depth qualitative interviews with senior information technology professionals, managers, directors and leadership were conducted. Data coding and analysis followed the Gioia methodology to develop a theoretical framework. Findings The theoretical paradigm of workforce agility is seeing revisions. In the past it was solely connected to resource-based view theory, current literature superficially speaks of the link with dynamic capability but lacks comprehensive and strategic understanding. The research brings in the evolutionary change by viewing workforce agility directly under the lens of dynamic capability theory and recognizes workforce agility as a high-level strategy. Based on the analysis of the qualitative interviews this study has developed a conceptual heuristic of workforce agility drivers, interlinked with dynamic capabilities micro-foundations – “sensing”, “seizing”, and “continual renewal”. This paper conceptualizes workforce agility as a response to high pressures for the dynamic capability of the company, which requires reconfiguration and redeployment of external and internal human resources and an inherent need to bring some stability to the internal resources of the company. Originality/value There is a growing body of literature linking organizational agility with dynamic capabilities, which overlooks workforce agility. This study is theory-based research on workforce agility, which guides practitioners in making human resource processes more agile.

Development of a behavioral taxonomy of agility in the workplace

PurposeThe concept of workforce agility has become increasingly popular in recent years. However, defining it has sparked much discussion and ambiguity. Recognizing this ambiguity, this paper aims to inductively develop a behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility.Design/methodology/approachThe authors interviewed 36 experts in the field of agility and used concept mapping and the critical incident technique to create a behavioral taxonomy.FindingsThe authors identified a behavioral taxonomy consisting of ten dimensions: (1) accepting changes, (2) decision making, (3) creating transparency, (4) collaboration, (5) reflection, (6) user centricity, (7) iteration, (8) testing, (9) self-organization, and (10) learning.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors’ research contributes to the literature in that it offers an inductively developed behavioral taxonomy of workforce agility with ten dimensions. It further adds to the literature by tying the notion of workforce agility to the performance literature.Practical implicationsThe authors’ results suggest that it might be beneficial for companies to take all workforce agility dimensions into account when creating an agile culture, starting agile projects, integrating agility into hiring decisions or evaluating employee performance.Originality/valueThis paper uses an inductive approach to define workforce agility as a set of behavioral dimensions, integrating the scientific as well as the practitioner literature on agility.

Workforce agility: a systematic literature review and a research agenda proposal

Workforce agility has been described as a management strategy that allows companies to respond quickly and effectively to threats and opportunities arising from a competitive and unstable business environment. In the current literature, there is still a lack of efforts to systematically review the state of the art on this subject. The aim of this paper is to address this gap by studying the academic progress on workforce agility. A systematic literature review was carried out to analyze the academic articles within the workforce agility topic that were published online until the end of June 2020 in three electronic databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Science Direct. The bibliometric indicators present how the field has developed and which actors (authors, institutions, countries, journals) are the most relevant. Regarding the conceptual aspects, the findings allowed us to identify that an agile workforce consists of four interrelated and interdependent dimensions: proactivity, flexibility and adaptability, resilience, and competence. These attributes can be promoted through strategies related to i) learning and training, ii) forms of work organization, iii) human resource management; and iv) culture and organizational structure. Our findings also allowed us to propose an agenda for future studies on workforce agility and other related topics. This paper contributes by promoting a debate on a subject still incipient in the literature, especially in Latin America, and by highlighting the potential competitive advantage associated with workforce agility for companies.