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Leadership agility in the context of organisational agility: a systematic literature review

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Abstract

Organisations across the globe are looking to become agile and are seeking leaders to guide their transformation to agility. This paper conducts a systematic literature review across eighty-six papers spanning over 25 years (1999–2023), to develop an overview of how leadership agility is conceptualized in the context of organisational agility in the extant literature. This systematic review was conducted using the PRISMA framework. The databases searched for the review were: EBSCO, Emerald Insight, JStor, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, and Scopus. The data thus collected was organised and integrated using reflective thematic synthesis. Literature suggests that leadership agility is one of the key dimensions to foster organisational agility, though challenging in practice and difficult to implement. Based on the analysis of extant literature, this paper identifies four emergent themes of leadership agility: Leadership Agility Mindsets; Leadership Agility Competencies; Leadership Agility Styles; and Leadership Organisational Agility Functions. This study has conceptualized a framework of leadership agility in the context of organisational agility, anchored in the interplay of the emergent themes and their categories, contributing to leadership agility research, and promoting its adoption by the practitioners.

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Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the Research Ethics and Review Board (RERB) at O.P. Jindal Global University for their review and approval on our research study.

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The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

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All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by first author. The first draft of the manuscript was written by first author and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Latika Tandon.

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Appendix

Appendix

See the Table 6, 7 and 8.

Table 6 List of studies not included in the SLR
Table 7 Leadership agility categories across 86 documents included in the SLR
Table 8 List of 14 cross-referenced studies included in the SLR

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Tandon, L., Bhatnagar, T. & Sharma, T. Leadership agility in the context of organisational agility: a systematic literature review. Manag Rev Q (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-024-00422-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-024-00422-3

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