Organizational Culture and Agility: Organizational cultural setting in agile enterprises

Nowadays, business environments are frequently characterized by complexity, unpredictability and high volatility. As a result, organizations are currently looking for new approaches in order to deal with these uncertain market conditions. One concept which seems to handle these issues most properly is that of organizational agility (OA). However, changing an organization to an agile one is challenging. In this regard, one of the most underestimated issues in this regard is organizational culture (OC). This Masters thesis aims to examine cultural profiles and values supporting agility and presents a framework of agility implementation stages. For this reason, four organizations at different agility implementation stages were analyzed in depth. Finally, several propositions for further research were formulated: (1) Different cultural values are prevalent in various developmental stages of an agile organization, (2) agility is enhanced by a culture with adhocracy and clan values (referring to the Competing Values Framework and (3) agility requires top management commitment and support.