Workforce Agility: A systematic Literature Review and a Research Agenda Proposal/AGILIDAD DE LA FUERZA LABORAL: REVISI
| Autor | Tessarini, Geraldo, Jr. |
| Cargo | Gesti |
Introduction
In the political-economic scenario of today's capitalist society, companies are increasingly operating under global competition and market dynamics based on uncertainties, unpredictability, and constant and fast-paced changes with direct and indirect impact on their activities (Munteanu et al., 2020; Teece et al, 2016; Varshney & Varshney, 2020).
The business environment has historically been influenced by widely known factors that may be potential opportunities or threats, such as new technologies, new business models, new ways of dealing with competition, digitalization, market deregulation and fragmentation, economic uncertainties, changing demographics, and ongoing social and political turbulence (Björkdahl, 2020; Felipe et al, 2020; Holbeche, 2018; Zitkiené & Deksnys, 2018). Moreover, customers are no longer mere receivers of products, rather they play a crucial role in the production process (Yang & Liu, 2012). Therefore, companies have the challenge to adapt continuously to their demands, quickly and exclusively (Munteanu et al, 2020).
Based on the above, the big question within the academic and business environments is how to successfully handle and respond to these factors (Appelbaum et al., 2017). On this regard, different actions and models have been proposed and implemented over the years, such as reengineering, business networks, modular organizations, flexible production, and just in time workforces (Sherehiy et al., 2007).
One of the most recent strategies is the concept of agility, which first became popular in the early 1990s among North American scholars (Qin & Nembhard, 2015). Since then, many researchers have dedicated their time to study its related concepts, measures, and functions (Nouri & Mousavi, 2020), arguing that with the advances in information technology and the changes in paradigms and production strategies, agility would be a potential opportunity to boost the productivity and profitability of industrial capital, partly replaced by the increasing financial dominance. Above all, agility would be a strategy that allows organizations to survive on a borderless battlefield (Carvalho et al, 2019; Holbeche, 2018; Storme et al, 2020).
Agility is generally described as the ability to gain effective advantage, exploit opportunities and withstand threats derived from frequent and sometimes unexpected changes, responding quickly by reconfiguring resources, strategies, and people in an efficient and effective manner (Baskarada & Koronios, 2018; Holbeche, 2018; Qin & Nembhard, 2010; Walter, 2020; Yang & Liu, 2012).
Despite the numerous studies and frameworks describing agility, building common understanding on the matter remains a challenge (Appelbaum et al, 2017; Baskarada & Koronios, 2018; Nouri & Mousavi, 2020; Walter, 2020; Wendler, 2013). Studies are scattered in both diverse and specific aspects, such as agile organization/enterprise (Goldman & Nagel, 1993; Yang & Liu, 2012), agile manufacturing (Gunasekaran, 1999; Yusuf et al, 1999), agile supply chain (Shashi et al., 2020; Tarafdar & Qrunfleh, 2017), agile software development (Gupta et al., 2019; Misra et al., 2012), and agile workforce (Breu et al., 2002; Storme et al, 2020).
Workforce agility is a complex multidimensional approach and a broad field of study (Muduli & Pandya, 2018), generally included in the domain of organizational and manufacturing agility, with greater emphasis on studies in the field of operations management and, more specifically, on the factory floor (Qin & Nembhard, 2015). Despite the acknowledgment that it is people who are the main source of competitiveness as well as the main promoters of agility and anticipators of change (Holbeche, 2018; Munteanu et al., 2020), workforce agility is among the least studied aspects to date (Harsch & Festing, 2020; Muduli & Pandya, 2018; Storme et al, 2020), as observed in the lack of efforts to systematically review the state of the art of this subject. In this sense, this paper aims to analyze and systematically review the academic progress on workforce agility in order to identify its main aspects and ongoing gaps and to propose an agenda for future research. Specifically, our main study questions are:
(i) How is the literature on workforce agility in terms of publications?
(ii) What qualities and characteristics of the workforce make it agile?
(iii) What kind of policies, actions, and strategies could foster workforce agility?
As a contribution, our paper explores, revises, and systematizes information regarding workforce agility, highlighting its relevance to the academic-scientific community and encouraging companies and managers to see workforce agility as a competitive business advantage. The next section discusses the methodology deployed for this study. After that, we present an overview of the papers comprising this study. Subsequently, we will discuss results and provide directions for future research. The last section presents the main conclusions from this study.
Methodology
Our study is a systematic literature review developed according to the model provided by Tranfield et al. (2003), chosen for being one of the most widely adopted and cited in management literature. According to their model, systematic literature reviews consist of three stages: planning, conducting, and reporting (figure 1).
Our planning stage began with a preliminary review of the scope and state of the art of agility/workforce agility in order to define our study questions and review protocol (table 1).
We also verified that this review article was feasible, as well as needed. To the best of our knowledge, there are no systematic reviews on workforce agility to date. This is a new interdisciplinary topic commonly inserted in general research on agile enterprises and agile manufacturing.
The surveys took place on July 25, 2020 (conducting stage). The systematic search used three electronic databases: Web of Science (WoS), Scopus, and Science Direct. To obtain a comprehensive set of papers, we used the string "workforce agility" OR "employee agility" OR "agile workforce." Our study encompasses academic research papers including at least one of the terms in the abstract, title, or keywords, and published online before late June 2020.
Figure 1. Stages of systematic literature review. 1 Planning *Identification of the need for a review *Goal setting and search problem *Development of a review protocol 2 Conducting * Selection of studies * Study quality assesment * Data extraction and synthesis 3 Reporting * Presentation and dissemination * Final report Source: Tranfield et al. (2003). Note: Table made from bar graph. Our search resulted in 73 papers from Scopus, 40 from WoS, and 10 from Science Direct. The first screening process excluded all papers considered not eligible for analysis (NE) based on the following exclusion criteria: published in books, book chapters or conference proceedings (NE1), and not written in English (NE2), as described in table 1.
The remaining references were exported to Start--version 3.03, a tool to assist researchers in the use of the SLR technique developed by the Laboratory of Research on Software Engineering (LaPES) at the Computing Department of the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil.
After removing duplicates and articles that did not provide free access to their full text (NE3), 55 papers were studied in detail. The second screening process excluded papers considered little related or not related at all (NR1, NR2, and NR3), Papers considered partially (PR1 and PR2) or closely related (CR) to our objectives were included (table 1).
Our final portfolio comprised 31 papers for analysis in stage 3 (reporting). Although our inclusion and exclusion criteria were clear and straightforward, eligibility was still subjective. Therefore, we cannot rule out the hypothesis that other relevant studies might have been ignored. Figure 2 presents a summary of our methodological approach.
Characterization of current research on workforce agility
Regarding our first study question, the literature on workforce agility is scarce, indicating that this field of study is still maturing. Our review presents an overview of the selected papers to understand how the field has developed and which actors (authors, institutions, countries, journals) are the most relevant. Figure 3 compares the number of publications and citations. As observed, the first paper was published in 2001 and the number of papers published per year has remained stable ever since. Additionally, the number of citations grew exponentially from 2010, peaking in 2019 (n = 150 Scopus; n = 95 WoS).
The papers published during this period have been cited 1,148 times in Scopus and 759 times in WoS. Three papers were responsible for more than 70% of the total citations in both databases. Six papers had not been cited until the end of this study. Table 2 presents the top 5 papers according to the number of citations.
The 31 papers included in our final portfolio were published by 69 different authors from 46 different universities or research centers. Only twelve authors published twice or more (figure 4), while only six universities published twice or more: Pandit Deendayal Petroleum University (n = 3), Northwestern University (n = 3), University of Science and Technology of China (n = 3), Pennsylvania State University (n = 2), Missouri University of Science and Technology (n = 2), and Loyola University of Chicago (n = 2). Considering these institutions, the papers published come from 15 countries, mainly the United States (n = 14) and Iran (n = 6), as seen in figure 5. In contrast, there are no research studies from Oceania and Latin America, with studies concentered in North America and Asia.
Our data indicates that no researchers nor institutions are largely involved in the study of agility from the workforce perspective. However, it is possible to assert the existence of...
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