Unpacking leadership agility: Archetypes and microfoundations

Organizations increasingly operate in volatile environments that require flexibility in strategic decisions and continuous adaptability. While dynamic capabilities explain how firms renew and reconFigure. resources under change, less is known about how leadership contributes to agility in day-to-day organizing. Although leadership agility (LA) is frequently invoked as a response to turbulence, empirical insight into how leaders enact agility and how organizational context shapes this enactment remains limited. This study addresses this gap through a multiple-case analysis of 24 organizations in the consumer goods sector, where short cycles and cross-functional interdependence make adaptive decision processes observable. Based on 54 semi-structured interviews complemented by archival data, we adopt an inductive theory-building approach to examine how LA is enacted in practice. The findings show that LA is not a leadership style or trait, but a set of recurring cognitive, behavioral, and relational routines that shape how leaders interpret uncertainty, commit to action, and coordinate collective response. These microfoundations are enabled and constrained by organizational mechanisms such as decision-right allocation, coordination processes, and feedback systems. Cross-case comparison reveals three archetypical configurations of LA, distinguished by their underlying decision-making architecture: execution-focused, expertise-centered , and portfolio-orchestrated LA. The study connects leadership and dynamic capabilities research by conceptualizing LA as a set of recurring leadership routines that operate as microfoundations of strategic sensing, seizing, and transforming. For practitioners, the findings highlight that effective LA depends less on adopting generic agile behaviors and more on deliberately designing decision architectures, governance structures, and leadership development systems that enable adaptative decision-making.