Psychological Empowerment and Workforce Agility

Unpredictable, dynamic, and constantly changing environments require an ‘agile organization.’ The notion of an agile workforce has been discussed as critical to creating an agile organization. Despite the increasing recognition that workforce agility is critical to achieve competitiveness, the concept of workforce agility has not yet been systematically studied. The current research has been proposed on the assumption that employee cognition can support agile attitude and behavior. The research has been conceptualized considering psychological empowerment as an important employee cognition capable of promoting workforce agility. Following the Spreitzer, psychological empowerment, in the form of meaningfulness, self-determination, competence, and impact, has been proposed as facilitators of workforce agility. Our result supports the conceptualization implicit in the literature and suggests that psychological empowerment must be considered as an important aspect of an organization’s effort to foster workforce agility. Further, from among the psychological empowerment variables, impact is the most influential variable followed by self-determination, meaning and competence on workforce agility. While the study result agrees with few cognitive theories such as self-determination theory, job characteristics theory, and sense-making theory, the result has important managerial implications.