From Rigidity to Responsiveness: A Holistic Analysis of the Key Pillars of Strategic Agility in Modern Enterprises

Abstract The paper examines the relationship between strategic agility and organizational adaptation in European enterprises. It combines quantitative research, based on a survey of 456 EU enterprises conducted between 2023 and 2024, with a structured narrative literature review. The empirical section explores six dimensions of strategic agility on a preliminary basis: values, technologies, workforce, management, collaboration, and structures. The findings indicate that collaboration and values scored lowest on the reverse-coded scale, suggesting higher perceived agility, while management and workforce reached higher scores, indicating lower perceived agility. Significant associations emerged across all six dimensions, with management demonstrating the strongest links to workforce, collaboration, and structures. Demographic factors had limited connections with perceived agility, and enterprise age showed only a weak exploratory link to management agility with limited practical importance. The findings provide preliminary proof for an integrated framework connecting technological, cultural, workforce, managerial, collaborative, and structural aspects of strategic agility. The study relates strategic agility to flexible systems management by proposing how strategy, processes, learning, and performance might be conceptually connected in response to changing conditions. For practical purposes, the results emphasize that management development, employee involvement, and flexible systems should be viewed as interconnected areas for improving agility rather than separate initiatives.