Agility research mainly considers the agile workforce from an operations perspective. To date, a majority of research on workforce agility has focused on the speed and flexibility from an operations perspective, while studies on the attributes of agile workforce are lacking. Very few studies have been done on management actions that can promote workforce agility. The present paper addresses this research gap by exploring the attributes of an agile workforce and identifying the management practices capable of promoting workforce agility. An extensive survey of the available literature has been made to explore the attributes and facilitators of workforce agility, and therefore, the study is conceptual in nature. The findings reveal that an agile workforce is adaptive, flexible, developmental, innovative, collaborative, competent, fast and informative in nature. The study also explores the management actions on training, compensation, empowerment, teamwork, and Information Systems (IS) which promote workforce agility.

The problem of dealing with unpredictable, dynamic and constantly changing environments has been a prevailing topic both in the industry and academia for a few decades (Sherehiy et al., 2007). Organizations are changing their strategy and structure quickly to keep pace with the demands of uncertainty and change (Hannan and Freeman, 1984; and Eisenhardt and Sull, 2001). This requires organizations to adopt agile thinking. As Jackson and Johansson (2003) observed, agility is not a goal in itself but the necessary means to maintain the competitiveness in the market characterized by uncertainty and change.

An agile competitive environment is where the people skills, knowledge and experience are the main differentiators between the companies (Goldman et al., 1995). According to Hopp and Van (2004), an agile workforce can support strategic objectives of cost, time, quality and variety. An agile workforce is seen to increase productivity, profits and market shares, to grow a business in a competitive market of continuous and unanticipated change and to enhance organizations’ prospects for survival in an increasingly volatile and global business environment.

Management Research Journal, Workforce Agility, Literature, Information Systems (IS), knowledge-rich environment, competitive environment, ‘adaptability’, ‘flexibility’, and ‘agility’.