Linking business agility with people management practices

Abstract

Organisations pursuing - agility often struggle with strategic alignment issues. In this paper, we link business agility, as a competitive strategy, and strategic Human Resources Management (HRM), and investigate how HRM can facilitate business agility by creating a suitably organised workforce. By means of an explorative case study of agile small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in New Zealand and Switzerland, we describe hypotheses about a new HRM archetype. In these knowledge-intensive organisations from the service sector, HRM grows into a distributed and collaborative people management practice across the whole organisation. Characterised by self-organisation, it emphasises individual and collective learning, encourages continuous sensemaking and connecting to a common purpose.