Sustainable Agility Culture—The Case of a Pasta Company

Abstract

The ability of an organization to be agile, and, therefore, the organizational culture of agility that determines it, is a key characteristic necessary for enterprises to meet the challenges of the requirements of sustainable development under conditions of uncertainty. Uncertainty, in turn, is an inherent feature of achieving the challenging goals of growth and often survival in today’s competitive enterprise market. Analyzing the organization’s ability to be agile, the article includes the results of a study of the productivity of the pasta packaging process in a selected manufacturing company. The main purpose of the article was to identify the factors important for the implementation of the concept of organizational agility and to develop steps to follow the Shu Ha Ri methodology in a pasta packaging company in order to increase production productivity. Based on the data obtained in the form of the number of employees per shift and the amount of packed pasta, significant differences in the productivity of shifts were found, and the challenges of organizational agility were also identified, which include the changing nature of demand, the impact of the state of the machines on the continuity of production, and the occurrence of shortages at the packing stage due to the manual nature of the process. Based on the conducted research and analysis of the tools used in the formation of an agile culture, a proprietary approach to sustainably increase the productivity of the packaging process was proposed using the Shu Ha Ri methodology. The conducted research made it possible to formulate the paradigm of sustainable agility culture and its main dimensions for companies in the food industry.