Continuous Organizational Agility in a Highly Regulated Industry

Abstract

Unlike those in other industries, highly regulated entities, such as banks, are required to be agile to business uncertainties and unforeseen risks while complying with the growing regulations. Moreover, banks pose constant challenges in the form of digitization, globalization, automation, analytics, and other forces of change that will continue to accelerate; thus, implementing a short-term agile transformation strategy will burden the company with inefficiencies. Expanding organizational and strategic management theory for the conceptualization, continuous organizational agility will follow as the manifestation of the intertwined routine dynamics-dynamic capabilities-organizational agility relationship. This study reviewed, synthesized, extended the literature, and proposed the research idea based on the relationship between routine dynamics, dynamic capabilities, and their impact on organizational agility in an integrated model. Generally, the proposed model aims to clarify: (1) the ability of an agile company to maintain stability while being dynamic and (2) the development of a more efficient trade-off between agility and efficiency during the agile transformation process. This study may provide fruitful avenues for enriching literature and future study since a dearth of empirical evidence addresses the relationship.