Agility as a Bridge from Multilevel Governance to Organizational Performance: Evidence from Romanian Public Administration

In the current complex and increasingly turbulent societal context, strategic management (SM) represents a catalyst for organizational sustainability. Building on a previous study examining the relationship between sustainable development, institutional sustainability, collaboration, and organizational intelligence (OI), this paper extends the analysis to the public administration system. It aims to examine how multi-level governance (MLG) is associated with institutional performance through OI and organizational agility, conceptualized as SM capabilities. The research design is sequential and multi-methodological, combining a systematic literature review, content analysis, bibliometric mapping using VOSviewer, and a secondary descriptive analysis of data from a representative national survey conducted for the institution responsible for managing the civil service in Romania. The findings indicate that the MLG “architecture” does not, per se, lead to performance, but operates through internal organizational mechanisms. OI enables the capitalization of coordination, collaboration, and information through an emerging form of agility, termed proto-agility, characterized by incremental and procedural adjustments associated with process performance. Survey findings are not inconsistent with this proposed configuration. The originality of the study lies in clarifying the relationships among MLG, OI, agility, and performance, and in introducing the concept of proto-agility, distinguishing it from strategic agility. In the analyzed corpus, the strategic dimension of organizational agility remains insufficiently empirically supported in relation to MLG and OI.