Empowering organizational agility through a holistic management control system: A conceptual model

Today's business environment requires established companies to constantly innovate and adapt in order to remain competitive over the long term. To ensure this, many executives are striving for agility in their organizations. Currently, this concept is mostly viewed operationally as a project management approach. However, realizing the full strategic potential of agility requires a holistic, organization-wide approach. One way to implement such "organizational agility" is through the use of appropriate management control systems, but there is no established framework for this. To address this gap, this research paper qualitatively analyzes case studies of companies with an agility-enabling management control system to answer the question of how they can be designed to enable and support agile capabilities at the organizational level. The proposed new framework for management control systems includes five elements and their mutual interactions that help managers enable and support organizational agility for continuous innovation and adaptation: