Bibliometric analysis of the development of employee agility research over the past 25 years was conducted by mapping the annual output of articles on employee agility, to examine how academic interest in this topic has evolved. The trend in the number of articles on employee agility over the past 25 years is shown in Figure 2. The processed data on the annual trend of employee agility publications from 2000 to 2005 indicate an average growth of about 12% per year. The graph in Figure 1 also shows that publications on employee agility from 2000 to 2018 remained below 10 articles per year, except 2014, which saw a slight uptick to 12–13 articles. A surge in the number of employee agility studies occurred in 2019 and continued through 2024, during which the output of articles on this topic rose to more than 40 per year. This trend was likely driven by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, which caused disruptions in nearly every aspect of life and forced the world to live in a new normal era. As a result, agility—closely tied to the ability to respond and adapt to change—became a topic of heightened interest in academia.

The increase in studies on employee agility since 2020 reveals a growing academic focus on employees’ ability to adapt to increasingly dynamic and uncertain work environments. This rise in publications during the post-COVID-19 period suggests that employee and workforce agility are being recognized more as strategic capabilities. They are viewed not only as essential for supporting operational and technical work aspects but also for addressing employees’ psychological wellbeing. In line with previous empirical findings, agility is understood as a mechanism that helps organizations maintain performance while better preparing for future crises (Raut et al., 2022; Srivastava and Gupta, 2022). Furthermore, the growing attention to employee adaptive capabilities is also related to the acceleration of digital transformation and the adoption of work technologies, which demand flexibility and continuous learning at the individual level (Maran et al., 2022; Sony and Mekoth, 2022b). In the digital era, agility at the individual level, encompassing adaptability, proactivity, and resilience, is known to be a capability that can influence performance, innovation, and an organization’s ability to adopt new management models (Alviani et al., 2024). Therefore, the increase in employee agility research since 2020 reflects a shift in conceptual attention to agility as a dynamic capability. This increase was followed by conceptual differentiation, which will be further discussed in the next section through a science mapping analysis.

Bibliometric analysis was also conducted on the publication sources and articles that have published the most content on the theme of employee agility. Analyzing these data is important to provide an overview of the distribution of employee agility research across disciplines. The data on these sources are presented in Figure 3. The results shown in Figure 3 indicate that the majority of publications related to employee agility have been published in the journal Human Resource Management (11 articles), followed by Frontiers in Psychology (9 articles), Human Resource Development Quarterly (6 articles), and other journals focused on social science and psychology. Notably, journals outside the social sciences, such as Information Technology and People, have also published work on employee agility. Other articles are scattered across various journals that focus on general management and decision-making. This diversity of journal outlets suggests a cross-disciplinary trend in research on employee agility, spanning work psychology, management, and even technology-oriented disciplines.

Meanwhile, an analysis of the most highly cited articles was also performed, since a high number of citations provides insight into which research works serve as key intellectual foundations and main references in employee agility research. The documents that are most cited in employee agility studies from 2000 to 2025 are shown by Figure 4. These data showed that the three most-cited documents on employee agility are an article by Rebecca R. Kehoe and Patrick M. Wright titled “The Impact of High-Performance Human Resource Practices on Employees’ Attitudes and Behaviors,” with 830 citations. This article examines the relationship between employees’ organizational citizenship behavior and their perceptions of human resource management practices, as well as the factors that influence that relationship (Kehoe and Wright, 2013). Another highly cited article is by Jean-Charles Chebat and Paul Kollias titled “The Impact of Empowerment on Customer Contact Employees’ Roles in Service Organizations,” with 330 citations. This article focuses on how employees in the financial services sector cope with role conflict and role ambiguity, involving factors such as adaptability, self-efficacy, and job satisfaction (Chebat and Kollias, 2000). The next most-cited article is by Wang et al. (2017) with 280 citations; this work focuses on employee adaptability in the form of job crafting, which is influenced by transformational leadership. The subsequent highly cited publication is by Cullen et al. (2014) with 246 citations; this article primarily discusses how employees’ perceptions of change and organizational support influence job satisfaction and performance. Another frequently cited study is by Beltrán-Martín et al. (2008) with 241 citations, which was one of the early articles explicitly linking human resource management practices with workforce agility. Additionally, an article by Hopp et al. (2004) with 200 citations, connects agility with flexibility in management.

An analysis of the most relevant sources and most-cited documents shows that research on employee agility remains strongly rooted in human resource management, where employee agility is viewed as a behavior arising from employee talent development, leadership, and job design. Employee agility, as a product of human resource management, then becomes a flexible behavioral mechanism that allows employees to respond effectively to organizational demands, especially those related to performance improvement. Therefore, within this framework, employee agility links managerial systems and organizational performance to the organization’s adaptive capacity, of which employee agility is the micro-foundation. The dominance of this approach indicates that HRM provides a key intellectual foundation for early research on employee agility, supporting further conceptual expansion in later phases.

In addition to publication sources and influential articles, the bibliometric analysis also identified the most prolific authors in the field of employee agility. This helps illustrate who the key figures are that have consistently contributed to building and expanding the literature, and it also reflects the disciplinary loci that are driving growth in this research topic. The most relevant authors in the field of employee agility research are shown in Figure 5. This figure shows that Abdul Hameed Pitafi is the author with the highest number of articles on employee agility (16 articles). This finding underscores that Pitafi is a key figure in employee agility research, particularly on issues related to digitalization and digital innovation. Other authors such as Nandakumar Mekoth, Ashutosh Muduli, and Michael Sony, each with seven articles, also play important roles in extending the agility literature in the context of human resources and organizational behavior.

Articles published by Pitafi are known for their focus on research linking the role of enterprise social media with employee agility behavior, where enterprise social media can influence employee agility through higher quality communication, the formation of psychological safety, knowledge transfer, knowledge sharing, and more visible communication (Liu and Soomro, 2025; Pitafi et al., 2019, 2020; Pitafi, 2025; Pitafi et al., 2025c; Pitafi and Ren, 2021; Wei et al., 2020). In addition, in several of his studies, Pitafi also highlighted problems in the context of work implementation, such as conflict, stress, and work structure that can be related to employee agility (Pitafi, 2025; Pitafi et al., 2018, 2020), as well as the relationship between employee agility and digital competence and employee creativity (Lai et al., 2021; Pitafi et al., 2020; Rasheed et al., 2023; Wei et al., 2020). Meanwhile, the articles written by Nandakumar Mekoth together with Michael Sony mostly have a main focus on frontline employee adaptability in the service sector, both in its measurement, its relationship with the psychological side and organizational support, as well as the relationship between employee agility and technological skills possessed by employees (Sony and Mekoth, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016a, 2017a, 2017b, 2019, 2022). Meanwhile, Ashutosh Muduli mostly writes articles about employee agility in the scope of learning agility and knowledge transfer, and the relationship between employee agility and employee psychological conditions or psychological empowerment, as well as their digital capabilities or abilities (Ghosh and Muduli, 2021; Muduli, 2016, 2017; Muduli and Choudhury, 2025; Muduli and Pandya, 2018; Srigouri and Muduli, 2024a).

An analysis of the most cited authors shows that the main intellectual contributions to employee agility research have developed through several distinct yet complementary thematic areas. Pitafi’s work mainly links employee agility to the digital environment and social interactions, especially through the role of enterprise social media in shaping communication quality, psychological safety, and knowledge sharing and transfer processes. Meanwhile, research by Sony and Mekoth focuses primarily on the adaptability of frontline employees in the service industry, emphasizing the importance of psychological wellbeing, organizational support, and technological skills in promoting agility. Muduli’s contribution, on the other hand, places employee agility within a framework of learning agility and psychological empowerment, highlighting the significance of individual learning, empowerment, and digital skill development. Overall, this pattern indicates that the most influential literature on employee agility has moved beyond traditional HRM methods toward a more multidimensional understanding that includes digital, psychological, learning, and workplace contexts.

An interesting finding from this analysis is that most productive authors come from an Asian background, especially India and Pakistan, which may influence the research environment. The distribution of countries of origin for corresponding authors in employee agility research is shown in Figure 6. The figure reveals that the largest number of employee agility articles was written by authors from India, with over 40 publications. Most of the publications by India-based authors were single-country studies (domestic research), rather than international collaborations involving multiple countries. Corresponding authors from China and the USA also contributed a significant number of articles, with each country producing over 20 and over 10 publications, respectively. Similar to India, research by authors in China and the USA more often took the form of domestic studies rather than cross-country collaborations. A similar trend is seen among corresponding authors from Malaysia, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, and several other nations. In Indonesia, nearly all publications in this field have been conducted domestically. However, a different pattern appears in countries like Pakistan, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, and Poland, where corresponding authors more frequently engaged in cross-country research collaborations than purely domestic studies (even though the total number of publications from each of these countries is relatively small, fewer than 10 documents). This is notable because extensive domestic and international researcher networks can expand the impact and discussion on employee agility within the academic community.

The distribution of the most prolific and corresponding authors by country indicates that research on employee agility has primarily developed in an Asian context, especially in India and Pakistan. This pattern suggests that most empirical work on employee agility originates from organizational settings in developing countries and economies experiencing rapid change, where issues like workforce flexibility, digitalization, and human resource management are particularly relevant. Additionally, the dominance of domestic publications (single-country studies) in nearly all contributing countries implies that employee agility is mainly studied within specific national and institutional contexts. While some countries are more active in cross-border collaboration, international networks in employee agility research are generally limited. This highlights the contextual nature of the development of the employee agility literature and offers insights into the geographic and institutional factors shaping knowledge in this field.

To examine the centers of intellectual influence in employee agility research globally, a bibliometric analysis was conducted of the countries most frequently cited in studies on employee agility. Over the last 25 years, the status of the most cited countries as shown by Figure 7. The analysis identified that the United States (USA) has been cited 2,672 times in articles on employee agility, making it the most frequently cited country in the global research landscape. Meanwhile, China and the Netherlands are the second- and third-most-cited countries in employee agility research, with 1,185 and 1,001 citations, respectively. Notably, the data do not yet show any Southeast Asian countries with substantial citation counts on this topic, reflecting that research originating from those countries has not (yet) been prominent in the literature.

Identifying the countries most frequently cited in employee agility research is important since it indicates the research contexts considered representative and relevant to understanding employee agility globally. Thus, a high number of citations from a given country not only reflects academic influence, but also suggests that the social, economic, and organizational contexts of that country are deemed pertinent and illustrative for the global understanding of employee agility. The dominance of the United States, China, and Western European countries as the most-cited nations indicates that the development of employee agility has been heavily influenced by established organizational and managerial settings in the global literature. The high citation rates from these countries suggest that empirical findings and conceptual frameworks from these contexts are the main reference points for understanding and explaining employee agility. On the other hand, the limited number of citations to research from Southeast Asia indicates that contributions from these regions have not yet been widely integrated into mainstream discussions of employee agility. This pattern suggests that although research on employee agility is growing geographically, its intellectual structure remains relatively concentrated, with dominant ideas about employee agility mainly shaped by the organizational and institutional experiences of a few key countries.

This study also explored the most frequently used keywords by researchers in articles on employee agility. By analyzing patterns of commonly used terms, we can identify the main focus areas within employee agility over the past 25 years. The results, showing the most common words in employee agility research from 2000 to 2025, are displayed in Figure 8. The analysis revealed that the keywords “performance” (27 times) and “work” (55 times) are frequently used in this field. Other common terms include impact, management, and behavior, indicating a shift toward viewing agility as proactive capabilities that enable individuals to actively adjust and shape their work. The distribution of frequently used keywords highlights a strong emphasis on performance-related outcomes and work contexts, suggesting that the literature predominantly frames the phenomenon in terms of its practical implications rather than as an isolated concept. The prominence of terms such as performance, work, and impact indicates that earlier studies have mainly focused on how adaptive and responsive capabilities lead to tangible organizational results. Meanwhile, the presence of keywords related to management, antecedents, models, and behavior reflects a growing scholarly interest in understanding the underlying mechanisms, behavioral processes, and organizational conditions through which these capabilities are developed and enacted. Overall, this pattern suggests an evolution of the research toward more integrated explanations that connect individual behavior, management practices, and organizational performance.

A co-citation network analysis was performed to identify the intellectual structure in employee agility research, which comprises groups of authors who are often cited together. This analysis was based on descriptive data processed using Biblioshiny, and the results are shown in Figure 9. Figure 9 shows that over the past 25 years, the network of authors in the employee agility literature can be grouped into three main clusters. The first cluster, marked by orange nodes and networks and populated by authors such as Ashutosh Muduli, Deepika Pandita, Y. Zhu, and Pandya, represents psychological and individual-level approaches to employee agility. In this cluster, agility is understood as an adaptive capability related to employee psychological empowerment (Muduli and Pandya, 2018), an individual’s ability to respond to changes triggered by digital transformation and technological developments (Muduli and Choudhury, 2025; Rastogi and Pandita, 2025; Vapiwala et al., 2025), and its relationship to learning processes (Ghosh et al., 2021; Ghosh and Muduli, 2021; Srigouri and Muduli, 2024b). This cluster structure shows that employee agility is explained through psychological and learning mechanisms as the main micro-foundations at the individual level.

The second cluster, represented by purple nodes and networks and including authors such as Nandakumar Mekoth and MHA Athamneh, focuses on human resource agility and how organizational context influences employee agility. Unlike the HRM approach, which highlights specific managerial practices and systems, this cluster views agility as a human resource capability at the organizational or collective level, shaped by organizational support, structure, and readiness (Athamneh and Jais, 2023; Husni et al., 2023; Sony and Mekoth, 2017a, 2017b). Therefore, employee agility is understood as the outcome of interactions between the individual and the wider organizational environment. This cluster demonstrates a meso-level perspective that connects the structural view of HRM with the individual psychological approach.

The third cluster, led by authors such as Abdul Hameed Pitafi and Prerna Panda, shows a strong connection between individual employee agility and technological and knowledge-based processes. In this cluster, employee agility is understood as an adaptive capacity embedded in technology use and knowledge-sharing mechanisms (Lai et al., 2021; Pitafi, 2025; Pitafi et al., 2025a; Rasheed and Pitafi, 2025), as well as in organizational factors such as organizational virtuousness (Panda and Singh, 2025a, 2025b, 2026). The structure of this cluster reveals that employee agility is not just a result of technological or organizational influences but also relates to aspects of wellbeing and work behavior, such as job crafting. Therefore, this cluster highlights an approach that considers employee agility as an integrated capability within a dynamic socio-technological and organizational system.

Overall, the cluster structure resulting from the co-citation analysis shows that employee agility research has evolved through multiple complementary intellectual pathways. Psychological approaches at the individual level highlight the importance of internal readiness and learning processes as micro-foundations of agility, while meso-level approaches place employee agility within the context of human resource capabilities and collective organizational influence. Conversely, socio-technological approaches expand the understanding of employee agility as an adaptive capability embedded in a technology- and knowledge-driven work ecosystem. These connections between clusters demonstrate that employee agility does not develop in a straight line within a single perspective but is instead shaped by the interaction of individual, organizational, and contextual factors. Therefore, the results of this co-citation analysis confirm that employee agility is a multidimensional construct shaped by contributions from various intellectual traditions, thereby providing the conceptual foundation for structural and thematic mapping in future analyses.

An analysis of the intellectual framework of employee agility research was also performed using bibliographic coupling to visualize the relationships between recent documents based on shared references. This illustrates the direction of current theoretical progress in employee agility studies. The results of the bibliographic coupling are presented in Figure 10, which maps research themes according to their centrality and impact. Centrality shows how connected a theme is to others in the research network, reflecting its importance or key position within the overall field. Impact, on the other hand, measures the maturity and internal strength of a theme, indicated by the number of supporting studies and the consistency of conceptual and methodological development. Combining these two measures allows themes to be classified into four groups: motor themes, niche themes, basic themes, and emerging or declining themes.

The analysis shows that workforce agility is a key and influential theme. This finding indicates that the current literature on employee agility is increasingly focusing on team-level agility and positioning workforce agility as an important concept that links different research areas. The role of workforce agility as a main theme marks a shift from viewing agility as an individual outcome to understanding it as a coordinated ability built into teamwork and organizational systems. Along with these primary themes, the bibliographic coupling map also highlights niche themes and those in emerging or declining fields. Although these themes have fewer connections to others, they show the diversification and expansion of employee agility research.

Specifically, the appearance of themes related to digitalization and individual adaptability in the quadrant shows that research on employee agility is increasingly focusing on integrating socio-technical factors and personal adaptive skills. Overall, this pattern indicates that while workforce agility remains a key focus in current research, studies on employee agility continue to evolve by combining individual and digital perspectives, which may shape future research directions. Therefore, this bibliographic coupling structure confirms the ongoing development of employee agility research, balancing both conceptual stability and thematic innovation, serving as a foundation for more detailed conceptual mapping in future studies.

Whereas co-citation analysis maps the network of authors in the employee agility field, co-word analysis offers insight into how key concepts in the employee agility literature are interrelated and have evolved by analyzing the keywords appearing in that literature. The co-word analysis in this study draws on thematic maps produced by Biblioshiny and VOSviewer, as well as trending topic data from Biblioshiny. Before conducting the co-word analysis, a process of cleaning and grouping keywords was performed to ensure the results remained consistent and clear. The initial keywords were taken from the author keywords and index keywords of the included journal articles. First, an automated cleaning step was carried out using bibliometric software, which involved converting all terms to lowercase, removing duplicates, and standardizing singular and plural forms (e.g., “employee agility” and “employees’ agility”). This manual step followed established bibliometric practices to reduce fragmentation caused by different terminology. The final cleaned and grouped set of keywords was then used for the co-word analysis.

The results of the bibliometric analysis, both in performance analysis and in science mapping analysis, show that there remains a need for research that integrates agility at the individual (micro) level with agility at the work team (meso) and organizational (macro) levels. Previous literature has examined the role of organizations in shaping employee agility capabilities (Alavi et al., 2014; Breu et al., 2002; Franco and Landini, 2022; Harsch and Festing, 2020; Muduli, 2016, 2017; Sherehiy and Karwowski, 2014), the role of employee agility in translating the role of organizations in improving adaptive performance or performance in general during times of change (Alviani et al., 2024; Muduli, 2016; Salmen and Festing, 2022; Varshney and Varshney, 2024), and the role of agility as an antecedent of organizational agility and organizational performance (Alviani et al., 2024; Franco and Landini, 2022; Petermann and Zacher, 2022; Prieto and Talukder, 2023). However, although these studies have developed in parallel, those that explicitly position employee agility as a micro-foundation that connects and drives agility at the meso and macro levels remain relatively limited.

The literature on employee and workforce agility shows that most research is fragmented by level of analysis. At the individual level (micro-level), employee agility is generally understood as an individual’s capability to behave adaptively, proactively, and resiliently in the face of change (Alavi and Wahab, 2013; Alviani et al., 2024; Breu et al., 2002; Petermann and Zacher, 2022; Rasheed and Pitafi, 2025; Storme et al., 2020). Employee agility is also often associated with psychological factors and individual competencies, such as psychological empowerment (Cyfert et al., 2022; Muduli, 2017; Storme et al., 2020) and the use of digital technology (Durst et al., 2023; Ghosh et al., 2021; Muduli and Choudhury, 2025; Pitafi, 2025). At the organizational level (meso-level), agility is more often positioned as a result of managerial practices, organizational structure, human resource management, and flexible work systems (Alavi et al., 2014; Breu et al., 2002; Franco and Landini, 2022; Harsch and Festing, 2020; Muduli, 2016, 2017; Sherehiy and Karwowski, 2014), while at the institutional or environmental level (macro-level), employee agility is influenced by regulatory pressures, industry dynamics, and external environmental uncertainty (Ajgaonkar et al., 2022; Muduli, 2016; Salmen and Festing, 2022; Walter, 2021). Most empirical research still treats employee agility as a stand-alone independent or mediating variable, without explicitly linking it to the formation of organizational or institutional agility within a dynamic framework. Thus, although the literature is rich in identifying the antecedents and consequences of agility, the mechanisms by which employee agility contributes to the formation of cross-level agility through dynamic capability mechanisms have not yet been systematically formulated.

For example, a study by Petermann and Zacher (2022) highlighted the importance of the interaction of various factors at the individual, team, and organizational levels in fostering the formation of agile organizations. Meanwhile, research by Franco and Landini (2022), Lai et al. (2021), and Muduli (2017) demonstrated that individual technological and digital competencies can drive competency-based work structures, ultimately fostering organizational agility. Research that explicitly addresses the role of multilevel employee agility is conducted by Junker et al. (2022), who demonstrated that team-level agility can shape collective norms that enable individuals within the team to perform well. However, this research focused more on how meso-level agility shapes micro-level agility, while also examining how the collective influence of micro-level agility shapes meso- and macro-level agility.

The dynamic capabilities perspective highlights that organizational capabilities develop from the activities, behaviors, and interactions of actors at the micro level, which are then combined into capabilities at the meso and macro levels. In this view, employee agility can be seen as a micro-foundation that allows organizations to respond to change quickly and sustainably. Therefore, further research should create an integrated framework that explains these cross-level mechanisms and explores how to increase agility at each level by utilizing organizational resources, including the role of top management, a culture and climate that foster agility, and the dynamics of internal and external pressures.

The bibliometric analysis also shows that over the past 25 years, much of the literature has tended to associate employee agility with human resource management practices. The results of thematic mapping and trending topics analysis indicate a shift in research focus from traditional managerial practices to issues related to digitalization, innovation, and knowledge-based learning. However, the literature still reveals a tendency toward two fairly separate research streams: a human resource management-based approach and a digital technology-based approach. While employee agility is indeed closely related to HRM, environmental factors—especially digital transformation—cannot be ignored. One of the clearest gaps in the literature is the divide between one stream of research focusing on human resource-driven agility and another emphasizing digital-driven agility. Agility is seen as an enabler of innovation and change; therefore, innovation and digital competencies that help develop and strengthen agility are essential areas of research.

Traditional agility research (what we might call HR-driven agility) has largely highlighted the role of HRM practices, job commitment, employee engagement, and performance as primary antecedents of agility (Aldabbagh, 2023). This perspective frames agility as a product of effective human resource management practices—for example, through talent management, supportive leadership, and training programs (Jager et al., 2022). In this view, human resource-driven agility centers on an organization’s structural factors and human interactions as the foundation for developing individual agility.

In contrast, recent research trends increasingly emphasize digital-driven agility, namely the role of technology, digitalization, and digital competence as key determinants. Studies such as Alviani et al. (2024) and Pitafi et al. (2025a) highlight how the use of enterprise social media (ESM), AI-based systems, and knowledge-sharing platforms can drive individuals to become more adaptive, responsive, and innovative. In this context, agility is no longer seen merely as an outcome of traditional HR practices, but as arising from individuals’ ability to acquire digital competencies and interact productively within a digital ecosystem.

However, our bibliometric results show that these two streams of research have thus far progressed in parallel with little conceptual integration. Human resource-driven agility research is more prominent in the management and HR literature, whereas digital-driven agility appears frequently in the innovation, information systems, and technology management literature. Few studies explicitly bridge the two—for instance, by examining how HRM practices can enhance employees’ digital competencies, or how digital tools and analytics can strengthen the effectiveness of HR-driven agility initiatives. Yet, such integration is important for providing a comprehensive understanding of how employee agility is cultivated in the VUCA era.

This gap represents a significant opportunity for future research. Empirical studies can be directed toward testing multilevel models that integrate HRM factors with digitalization factors. For example, one could examine a model in which empowering leadership and talent management (as HR-driven antecedents) are combined with digital competence, AI adoption, and ESM usage (as digital-driven antecedents), to assess their joint impact on employee agility and organizational innovation (Naim et al., 2024; Zhang et al., 2022). Such integration would not only enrich theoretical understanding but also offer practical guidance for designing more comprehensive organizational strategies to develop agility. Therefore, future research needs to integrate these two perspectives, for example, by examining how HRM practices, leadership, and talent development can strengthen individual digital capabilities, and how digital technology can act as an enabler for the effectiveness of HRM practices in fostering employee agility.

Another aspect that needs attention in shaping agile individuals is the role of leadership and the presence of employee trust in leadership (Zhang et al., 2022). During times of organizational change, leaders who can maintain operational stability while empowering organizational resources and encouraging innovation are key to fostering agility. Prior research has shown that transformational leadership can enhance employee performance by developing individual potential and articulating a long-term organizational vision (Ali et al., 2025; Islam et al., 2021, 2022; Lee et al., 2023). Leadership behaviors that are oriented toward employees as valuable resources can influence employees’ feelings about change, their trust and understanding of changes taking place, as well as their performance and resistance to those changes (Weber et al., 2022). Employee trust in leadership is particularly critical during periods of change; thus, leadership styles that are transformational, servant-oriented, foster collaboration, and use reward systems in performance management should be employed to encourage employee behaviors that contribute to organizational agility (Musaigwa, 2023). Leaders must also be cautious in applying dual or multiple leadership styles, since not all combinations of styles may benefit the organization (Weber et al., 2022). The importance of building employee trust in leadership during times of change has not yet been supported by sufficient empirical research, especially concerning the relationship between trust in leadership and the development of employee agility that leads to optimal performance.

Moreover, in light of organizations’ need to maintain good performance and ensure sustainability in volatile environments, ambidextrous leadership—a leadership style that flexibly balances exploration and exploitation—has been suggested as well-suited to organizational needs (Khan et al., 2025; Zhang and Suntrayuth, 2024). Ambidextrous leadership has been found to have a positive and significant effect on agility by increasing an organization’s ability to respond to change while simultaneously innovating (Zhang and Suntrayuth, 2024). It has also been empirically shown to foster innovative work behaviors, increase work engagement, and build the talent agility required to develop an agile organization (Gouda and Tiwari, 2024). Other findings suggest that the combination of ambidextrous leadership and organizational agility drives sustainable innovation and business transformation (Khan et al., 2025). However, there is still a lack of research explicitly examining the role of ambidextrous leadership in fostering employee agility.

The analysis also highlights the limited exploration of psychological and sustainability dimensions in employee agility research. Although factors such as empowerment, mindset, and wellbeing have begun to receive attention in recent studies, they have not yet been fully integrated into the core framework of agility research. Future research could broaden its focus by viewing employee agility not only as a short-term adaptation mechanism but also as a capability that supports the long-term sustainability of individuals and organizations. This approach would enable a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between agility, psychological health, and organizational resilience. Future research should also pay greater attention to psychological dimensions and sustainability factors related to employee agility. Aspects such as employee wellbeing, career adaptability, and psychological empowerment can function not only as antecedents of agility, but also as important outcomes that support individual resilience and organizational sustainability (Storme et al., 2020). By treating psychological factors as integral to employee agility, future studies can broaden understanding to recognize that agility is not just a short-term adaptive capability but also a strategic capability for ensuring long-term sustainability in a VUCA world.

The bibliometric analysis also reveals critical limitations in the contexts of existing research on employee agility. Highly cited publications are still dominated by authors and institutions from the United States, India, and China, whereas research from Southeast Asia remains very limited. The dominance of these three countries in the agility literature can be understood, given their well-established research ecosystems and the intense digital transformation dynamics they face. However, investigating employee agility in Southeast Asian contexts is important because countries in this region have distinctive bureaucratic structures, work cultures, leadership styles, and societal conditions, which may differ from Western contexts. The applicability of agility-related theories and practices needs to be tested under these differing conditions to ensure their relevance and effectiveness.

Another context limitation is the heavy focus on private or commercial sector organizations, with far fewer studies conducted in government or public sector contexts. This gap is noteworthy because government organizations often have bureaucratic characteristics and face constraints such as limited resources and complex regulations, which can engender resistance to change. Building an agile government could foster innovation, continuous learning, and cross-unit collaboration, thus improving the performance of public institutions by enhancing collaboration and increasing the capacity to address complex social problems (Neumann et al., 2024).

In the face of a growing need for government organizations to also become agile—so that they can be responsive and adaptive to change—empirical research measuring how agility is formed, especially at the micro (individual) level in the public sector, is still scarce (Fischer and Neumann, 2024; Kühler et al., 2024; Neumann et al., 2024; Neumann et al., 2024). Neumann et al. (2024) suggest that adopting agility principles in government organizations should prioritize developing agility internally first. They describe forms of agility in government entities as “agile as a culture change,” “agile as governance,” and “agile as methodology.” Fischer and Neumann (2024) further argue that agility in government can be applied at three levels: macro (institutional), meso (organizational), and micro (individual). At the macro level, agility involves responses to external environmental changes, bureaucratic reforms, and regulatory adjustments; at the meso level, agility involves organizational restructuring, process redesign, and project management changes; and at the micro level, agility is reflected in individuals or teams through adaptive attitudes and behaviors. Therefore, empirical studies that examine the antecedents or impacts of employee agility at the micro level in government organizations are needed.