Organizational Mindfulness Perspective on Driving Enterprise System Adaptation and Organizational Agility

Abstract

Nowadays enterprise system(s) (ESs) have become a pervasive digital platform and are widely utilized by firms. However, uncertain environments require firms continuously adapt their ES. ES adaptation involves the postimplementation changes of an ES to meet changing business needs. How firms adapt their ES to facilitate organizational agility remains an understudied issue. Drawing from the literature of organizational mindfulness, this article holds that firms need to foster organizational mindfulness—a firm's willingness and capacity to capture and refine discriminatory details about its environments—to facilitate ES adaptation and organizational agility. We build and test a model based on 138 responses of Taiwanese manufacturing firms. Our findings demonstrate that organizational mindfulness can help firms to achieve better ES adaptation and organizational agility. Specifically, organizational mindfulness can facilitate not only ES adaptation but also entrepreneurial and adaptive agility that is the offensive and defensive dimensions of organizational agility. ES adaptation is mainly related to entrepreneurial agility. This article contributes to the agility literature by proposing and testing a model of how organizational mindfulness affects ES adaptation and organizational agility.