1. INTRODUCTION

Currently, organizations around the world are engaged in an environment where change is a key characteristic. Rapid technological progress, globalization, turbulent business models, novel and emerging markets, and ever-changing customer preferences are some of the daily challenges that most organizations ranging, from small to large, are currently coping with (Zitkiene & ^{Deksnys, 2018}). So far, various solutions such as reengineering, networking, virtual enterprises, modular corporations, high performing organizations, flexible manufacturing, and employee empowerment have been proposed, and that of “agility” has been proposed as one of them as well (^{Sherehiy et al., 2007}). The challenges mentioned above force organizations to follow those rules which make them more eficient and agile in order to survive. In order to compete in the current turbulent market environment effectively, organizations should be proactive and be able to anticipate change. To do so, organizational structures should embrace more levels of agility through response and flexibility. Experts in the industry require novel organizational solutions, tools, and techniques to deal with environmental alterations, identify new opportunities, and be more adapted to external forces. In other words, an agile organization demands agile organizational enablers, drivers, abilities, strategies, and practices (^{Deksnys, 2018}).

Organizational agility, that which is the capability of quickly responding to environmental changes through modifying products and services provided, is gradually becoming a critical issue to achieve and maintain a sustained competitive advantage in the fast-changing market (^{Singh et al., 2013}; ^{Zitkiene & Deksnys, 2018}). One of the prerequisites of an agile organization is an agile workforce (^{Breu et al., 2002}; ^{Muduli, 2013}). According to ^{Virchez, (2015)} the characteristics of agile organizations are grouped into five categories: strategic awareness (being aware of the external environment along with internal priorities) a reconfigurable organization (being able to easily redesign, rescale, realign and redeploy the processes, products, systems, work procedures, and even business models rapidly), organizational learning (the ability to identify an opportunity, transmitting that information, turning it into a viable and actionable strategy, testing it, learning from the test and finally deciding whether to develop or ignore it), flawless execution (having the ability of both integrating processes and balancing performance in different time frames) and an agile workforce (organizations that count on the capacities of their employees to deliver special skills at any time). In a research of workforce agility, Beatty (2005) concluded that considering agile workforce management in an organization enables it to acquire their targets through innovation, increases the strategic capacities, and curbs the workforce-related structural costs.

Organizational agility is one of the most fundamental issues of human resource management throughout the world as the changes in both workplace and the demand and supply of workforce should be considered in human resource strategies. The issue of workforce agility in Latin America could be also be an intriguing issue for most of the organizations in the region given such problems as: recruiting women in companies, increasing rates of unemployment in some countries of Latin America and the impact of recruiting highly skilled employees in the labor market. On the other hand, the history of Latin America has been identified by characteristics including oscillating rates of economic growth, inadequate development of human capital and notable rates of income inequality. However, as the decade of growth which stemmed from high commodity prices ends, countries in Latin America are now aware that they must take into consideration the challenge of productivity improvement as a reliable source of equitable and sustainable long-term growth, as this requires coping with the forthcoming challenges of skills development throughout the area (^{Fiszbein et al., 2016}). Accordingly, identifying the procedures of human resource agility and paying attention to aspects of pertinent drivers could empower and be beneficial to Latin American companies and thus achieving their goals.

Having reviewed the importance of workforce agility in organizations and given the dearth of systematic studies considering its essence and concept, (^{A. Gunasekaran, 1999}; ^{Sherehiy & Karwowski, 2014}) it has been noted that up until now the majority of the research has underlined the importance of agility from technical points of view (^{Sherehiy & Karwowski, 2014}). Given that studying specific human resource activities that would support the development of workforce agility have been neglected throughout the literature, this paper aims to study the mechanism of implementing workforce agility through a model incorporating drivers, strategies, and practices required for generating results derived from its implementation. Moreover, the effects of these elements (drivers, strategies, practices, and results) on each other are also assessed.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.4. Impact of workforce agility on organizational performance

Agile organizations are constantly attempting to protect and enhance their competitive position (^{Bottani, 2009}; ^{Angappa Gunasekaran et al., 2018}) in various ways which encompass producing high-quality products rapidly at reduced costs, (^{Bottani, 2009}; ^{Cheng et al., 2000}; Angappa Gunasekaran et al., 2018; ^{Meade & Sarkis, 1999}), customer satisfaction, (^{Cao & Dowlatshahi, 2005}; C.-T. ^{Lin et al., 2006}) workforce satisfaction, (^{C.-T. Lin et al., 2006}) improved capability of producing new products, (^{Sharifi & Zhang, 2001}) and removing valueless processes (^{C.-T. Lin et al., 2006}). As such, organizational agility provides other advantages for organizations including increased performance, profitability and an increment in market share as well as environmental objectives (^{Chakravarty et al., 2013}; C.-T. Lin et al., 2006; ^{Narasimhan et al., 2006}; ^{Vázquez-Bustelo et al., 2007}; ^{Wang et al., 2014}). So far, several studies have acknowledged that organizational agility has a positive impact on firm performance (^{Hazen et al., 2017}; ^{Inman et al., 2011}; ^{Vickery et al., 2010}; ^{Wang et al., 2014}; ^{Yusuf & Adeleye, 2002}). For example, ^{Vázquez-Bustelo et al. (2007)} concluded that a higher level of organizational agility implementation has a positive impact on financial, operational, and market performance through improving the strength of manufacturing.

Therefore, based on the theoretical studies and discussions reviewed above, the hypotheses of this study are provided as follows:

H₁: Workforce agility drivers have an impact on workforce agility practices

H₂: Workforce agility practices have an impact on workforce agility results and performances

H₃: Workforce agility drivers have an impact on workforce agility strategies H4: Workforce agility strategies have an impact on workforce agility practices

H₅: Workforce agility drivers have an impact on workforce agility results and performances

H₆: Workforce agility strategies have an impact on workforce agility results and performances

In addition, according to the discussions above, the conceptual model of this study is demonstrated as the following (Figure 1).

Figure 1 The Conceptual Model 

3. RESEARCH METHOD

4. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

In this paper, Human resource agility was considered as an effective topic in the organization and agility was also analyzed as a coherent and cohesive process. In the process of workforce agility, drivers, practices, strategies and results derived from the implementation were examined as the main concepts in agility. The results of this study showed that workforce agility drivers affect both workforce agility practices and strategies. In this case, it seems that Coercive, Mimetic and Normative drivers can lead to executive success and the realization of agile human resource management strategies. In order to improve the quality of workforce agility practices, attention to environmental drivers should be considered by organizations involved in this process. Paying attention to the performance of competitors and using their successful experiences in implementing the process of workforce agility through benchmarking, proper analysis and use of environmental drivers can be noteworthy tips to ameliorate the process of making the workforce agile. Moreover, in this study we found that practices and strategies of workforce agility affect the implementation results variable. Also, workforce agility strategies lead to the improvement of workforce agility practices. It seems that the formulation of strategies such as Staff empowerment, Reduction/integration and information technology-based strategies should be considered by managers in order to successfully implement agility processes. On the other hand, we found that in order to improve the performance and the implementation results of workforce agility, Employee intelligence and awareness, Employee competence, Employee flexibility and Employee knowledge management can be applicable tools. It is worth mentioning that these tools are most effective if they are considered within the framework of Staff empowerment, Reduction/Integration and IT-based strategies. Furthermore, we have concluded that workforce agility drivers do not affect the implementation results and performance of workforce agility. This suggests that agility drivers cannot directly lead to the appropriate results and consequences derived from implementing the workforce agility process. Instead, these drivers can be truly effective when they improve the performance of considered strategies and practices that may positively impact the expected drivers on the performance of whole system. In general, according to the concluding findings, in order to achieve appropriate and agile performance in the field of human resources, agility should be considered as a continuous and interconnected process, and in this process, based on the appropriate analysis of environmental factors, agility strategies and practices should be created and institutionalized into the overall organization. In this case, it seems that the realization of the desired performance is not out of reach.

Furthermore, concepts such as price changes, changes in global policy and distribution of resources (such as petroleum and base metals) are some specific characteristics of emerging economies. Therefore, in order to manage international organizations properly, identifying these changes and adopting accurate strategies to convert environmental threats into opportunities could make such organizations leading and prosperous within their industry. Currently, of the effective strategies that could be applicable is organizational agility which has been evaluated from the aspects of drivers, strategies and implementation results in this study. For instance, workforce flexibility and workforce knowledge were considered as practices of making the workforce agile, while competitive advantage was introduced as one of the results of implementing workforce agility strategies and practices. Hence, given the challenges in emerging economies including weak and unstable market capacity, political instability and restrictions of foreign accessibility, the findings of this paper have generated some pathways for understanding the management of firms in emerging economies.

Also, we used the SEM method to reach the results. This method examines all variables and their relationships coherently and simultaneously, meaning that it is an adaptable method for analyzing the results within the conceptual study model. In addition, we employed the institutional theory for conducting the conceptual model, illustrating how external environmental pressure affects an organization. This theory demonstrates that social frameworks, values and norms affect the economic behavior of individuals and organizations. As such, we applied the drivers of workforce agility demonstrating the distinctive theoretical perspective of this study regarding the issue of workforce agility. Strategic Choice Theory shows that managers’ discretion and the way in which they interpret environmental drivers have a considerable impact on their strategic decisions. Hence, Strategic Choice Theory is the basis of analyzing agility strategies in this research. As a result, all the points mentioned above indicated the methodological and theoretical contributions of this study.

Another point worth mentioning is that the data of this research were gathered before the Coronavirus pandemic. It seems that since the environmental conditions are the most important factors regarding the agility issue, this pandemic could have affected some results of this study, especially in the part of agility drivers in which Environmental changes can bring about legal, behavioral and social changes. However, investigating this question of: “how the Coronavirus might pandemic affect the concept of workforce agility,” may be the subject of future research.