The Empirical Research On The Influencing Factors Of Firm Agility

With the increasing velocity of market change, firm agility is now attracting more and more attentions from managers and scholars. Firm agility refers to the ability to satisfy customer’s needs by rapidly and accurately sensing and responding to market changes. Multiple studies and practices manifest that firms with high level of agility are able to expand market share, increase profit, and gain competitive advantages. Given the benefits of firm agility, the investigation on its antecedents are still insufficient and controversial. Thus, the current thesis aims to draw on different theoretical lens and investigate how to improve firm agility from both internal and external perspectives. Based on above, the author conducts the following three studies.The first study mainly investigate the mediating role of knowledge management capability in the relationship between IT capability and firm agility. Amongst the research on firm agility, IT capability attracts most attentions. Meanwhile, it is difficult to have a consistent understanding on the effect of IT capability in building firm agility. In addition, firm agility, as a knowledge-intensive capability, requires the deployment of knowledge resources. Drawing on this point, the current study considers knowledge management capability mediates the effect of IT capability on firm agility. Meanwhile, as strategic actions are conducted by employees, their important role in building agility is seldom mentioned by extant research. This study aims to address this research gap by investigating the moderating effect of innovative climate in building agility. The author claim that a favorable innovative climate helps employee better leverage IT to manage knowledge, thereby improving firm agility more efficiently.The second study is based on organizational learning theory, aiming to investigate the influence of supply chain collaboration on firm agility. This study adopts external perspective and considers supply chain partners as the resource supporting the development of firm agility. In the process of collaborating with partners, firms are able to learn advanced technical skills, managerial methods, and market intelligence, thereby taking actions to respond to the changing demands in marketplace. The author also considers this learning process is influenced by firm’s internal capability. Setting from organizational learning perspective, IT capability is the most important influencing factor. Hence, this study attempts to explore the moderating effect of IT capability in addition to the main effect of supply chain collaboration.The third study investigates the relationship between relational capital and supply chain agility. Supply chain agility is an extension of firm agility, focusing more on the response to market changes based on the cooperation with upstream and downstream members in supply chain. Drawing on resource dependence theory, the author claim that relational capital is able to provide critical resources for developing agility. However, this reliance on resources is not optimal in every situation and is vulnerable to external environment. When external environment is not favorable for the development of firms, they will leverage their relational capital and obtain key resources from partners. In contrast, when external environment is beneficial to firms, they tend to use their own power to control the key resources and decrease the reliance on partners. Thus, the moderating effect of external environment is considered in this study when exploring the direct effect of relational capital on supply chain agility. The author hypothesizes the moderating effect of environmental munificence, dynamism, and complexity to gain deeper understanding to this topic.This thesis adopts literature analysis, field investigation, and empirical analysis as research methods. The literature analysis concentrates on the review of existing literature on firm agility, aiming to gain a comprehensive understanding to the cutting edge of existing relevant research. Also, in this step, the gaps in current studies will be identified, in order to motivate the studies described in this thesis. After choosing research questions, the author conducts field investigation in several firms. The author firstly acquires the information about firm agility in order to provide evidence for choosing factors influencing agility. Then the author uses questionnaire survey and collects data from 228 firms in preparation for empirical analysis afterwards. In the stage of empirical analysis, the author adopts statistical methods to validate the reliability and validity of dataset, and test hypotheses with hierarchical regression analysis.The current thesis investigates the influencing factors of firm agility and provides suggestions for executives based on organizational capability theory, resource dependence theory, and organizational learning theory. This thesis mainly has three innovative points.First, this thesis sets from the knowledge-intensive attribute of firm agility to explore its influencing factors. The author conducts systematic literature review of the concept of agility and reveal its knowledge-intensive attribute. This finding is the key to solve the contradictions in the existing research of firm agility. All the three studies in this thesis reflect this attribute, which identify the important role of knowledge management capability, supply chain collaboration, and relational capital in the development of firm agility.Second, this thesis adopts multiple perspectives to investigate the influencing factors of firm agility in order to offer diverse insights to managers. The complexity of firm agility determines its development is subject to a plenty of influencing factors. The author focuses on the internal capability at first and investigates the enhancement of agility caused by IT capability and knowledge management capability. In the next two studies, the author extends the insight to the external and discovers the role of supply chain collaboration and relational capital as the antecedent of agility. From multiple theoretical lens, this thesis provides evidence to the deeper understanding of the antecedents of firm agility.Third, this thesis investigates the moderating effect of both internal and external factors, offering specific guidelines for making strategies. Building firm agility is a complex systematic project which needs the consideration of various factors. The author aims to provide prudent conclusions on this topic by considering the boundary conditions in this building process. Based on this, this thesis considers innovative climate, IT capability, and external environment as moderators. The investigation to boundary conditions not only enriches the current theoretical knowledge, but also offers the evidence to the strategy-making conducted by managers.