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 in the long term. To ensure this, many executives strive 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 to use appropriate management control systems, for which there is no established framework. To close this gap, the present research paper qualitatively analyzes case studies of companies with an agility-promoting management control system to answer the question of how these can be designed to enable and support agile capabilities at the organizational level. The proposed new framework for management control systems comprises five elements and their mutual interactions, which help executives to enable and support organizational agility for continuous innovation and adaptation: