The Impact of Organizational Agility on Empowerment of Employees of Executive Systems of Zahedan City

Author Name(s): Marziyeh Saedizadeh, Abdulrahman Naroue
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Abstract

The present study attempts to evaluate the impact of organizational agility on empowerment of employees of executive systems of Zahedan city. After extension of conceptual space of topic and a theoretical and empirical review of study, the study hypotheses are formulated. By survey method and a questionnaires of organizational agility of Sharifi and Zhang (1999) and employees empowerment of Spritzer (1995), the data of study were selected from 331 employees of Zahedan city by Morgan and Kerjeci table (1975) and ratio stratified sampling was used. For the validity of questionnaire, content validity and face validity were used and to evaluate reliability, internal consistency of items was evaluated by Cronbach’s alpha. The Cronbach’s alpha for organizational agility is 0.93 and for employees empowerment is 0.89. The results of study in bi-variate analysis show that there is a significant effect between the components of organizational agility, speed, competence, responsiveness and flexibility with empowerment of employees at the error level 0.01. The study results show that there is a significant difference between the effect of organizational agility on employees empowerment in terms of population features of age and work experience of employees at the error level 0.05.

Keywords

Organizational agility, Speed, Competence, Responsiveness, Flexibility, Employees empowerment, Zahedan

Introduction

Today, the organizations are encountered with the changes and challenges and the organization should cope up with them. On one hand, having a strategic view to the changes and opportunities of changes and the improvement of capabilities and organization can be a good mechanism for the long-term and sustainable success of organization. The response to changes and considering their advantage via strategic use of manufacturing and managerial methods are the main concepts of Agile manufacturing (Sepahvand, 2013). The advance IT and manufacturing can lead to the manufacturing agility and via the cost reduction, speed increase and quality improvement, organization agility is created (Crocitto,M ,& youssef,M.2003). Based on the rapid changes of knowledge, everything is changing considerably. As an open system, the organizations interact with the environment and for life continuance, the required the response to the environmental changes. For the survival, each organization in the current unreliable and dynamic environment requires agility. As a managerial concept, organizational agility was formed at first in a manufacturing basis namely flexible manufacturing systems and then it was developed to other business fields and it was raised as one of the organizational features (Ghorbanizade et al., 2011). Before providing this strategic document, Lihay University with the financial support of marine force of US and with Yakuka institute, performed some studies on 13 great manufacturing organizations including General Motors, General Electric, IBM, Texas, Instrument, etc. The above study answered the question that successful organizations had some features in the 21th century. Later, more than 100 other organizations were evaluated and in 1991, the results of study were published in a journal. Later in 1995, the results of above studies were published in the book Stive Goldman, Nigel and Press (1995) A “Agile competitors and virtual organizations”. The movement to agile manufacturing and achieving agility were on the priority for the manufacturing organizations of US and then European countries (Jafarnejad and Shahayi, 2007). The goal of an agile organization is enrichment and respecting the customers and employees with a set of capabilities to perform good reactions to the changes in the business environment (Krestive and Yusef, 2003).

 

Conclusion

As it was said in the theoretical issues, empowerment is the power based on competence and it should be created. This power is beyond what should be shared. The power is based on the thought that power is created via the continuous improvement of competence and its application. In this study, employee’s empowerment in executive systems of Zahedan city is evaluated with five components:

The findings of present study show that employee’s empowerment in executive systems of Zaehdan city from the view of employees of executive systems of Zahedan city with the mean 61.78 (cut off 51) is above average and at relatively good level. It should be said that various factors are effective on employee’s empowerment and they are grouped in three sets of individual, group and organizational factors. As it was said, we can consider organizational agility as the organizational factors of employee’s empowerment. Goldman (1994) summarizes agility in three terms of strategic reaction, universal changes and dominant system. He believes that agility is a complete reaction to the fundamental changes occurred in the dominant system on business competition in the top economies (Jafarnejad and Shahayi, 2010). The results of present study show that organizational agility in executive systems of Zahedan city with the mean 98.79 (cut off 87) is above average and it is at a relatively good level.

 

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