A Multilevel Social-Organizational Framework for Understanding Employee Agility in New Product Development Projects
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54938/ijemdss.2026.05.2.691Keywords:
Employee agility, Workforce agility, Agile project management, New Product Development, IT projects, Dynamic capabilitiesAbstract
Agile methods now dominate information technology (IT) new product development (NPD), yet the human capability that makes agile methods work remains under-theorized. Research on employee agility has grown rapidly but remains fragmented, weakly grounded in theory, and largely disconnected from the project contexts in which agility is most consequential. This conceptual paper integrates the latest employee agility literature with contemporary research on agile project management and digital agility to develop a multilevel framework of employee agility in agile IT NPD projects. Drawing on the micro foundations of dynamic capabilities, social cognitive theory and the job demand resources perspective, we define employee agility as a higher-order individual capability comprising proactivity, adaptability and resilience. In this study authors have formalized its composition and its individual level and project level relationships in a set of equations. Eight propositions link agile work design and agility oriented human resource management to employee agility through psychological empowerment and learning self-efficacy, and link employee agility to innovative work behavior and NPD project performance, with requirements turbulence and hybrid governance as boundary conditions. The paper contributes a theoretically anchored, testable model that positions employee agility as a micro foundation of organizational and digital agility in IT NPD, offering a structured agenda for empirical research.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Khawaja Zeeshan Waheed , Muhammad Ishfaq Khan, Naveed Imran
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