Just Be Agile - Decoding Agility in the Financial Sector
(2025) BUSN49 20251Department of Business Administration
- Abstract
- Agility has emerged as a strategic ideal across many sectors, especially within financial institutions facing heightened pressure to respond swiftly to technological disruption, regulatory shifts, and market volatility. While commonly positioned as a solution to organizational inertia, agility is often promoted through leadership programs and strategic narratives that assume a shared understanding among employees. Yet, how agility is interpreted and enacted at the individual level remains underexplored. This thesis investigates how employees within a financial institution understand, negotiate, and shape the discourse of agility, and what consequences these interpretations produce for identity, behavior, and organizational dynamics.
While... (More) - Agility has emerged as a strategic ideal across many sectors, especially within financial institutions facing heightened pressure to respond swiftly to technological disruption, regulatory shifts, and market volatility. While commonly positioned as a solution to organizational inertia, agility is often promoted through leadership programs and strategic narratives that assume a shared understanding among employees. Yet, how agility is interpreted and enacted at the individual level remains underexplored. This thesis investigates how employees within a financial institution understand, negotiate, and shape the discourse of agility, and what consequences these interpretations produce for identity, behavior, and organizational dynamics.
While the analysis is guided by discourse theory, the study employs an interpretive case study design to explore how employees make sense of agility in practice. Addressing a gap in existing literature, which often treats agility as either a strategic capability or a managerial fashion, this research shifts attention to how agility is meaningful in everyday work life. Drawing on seventeen semi-structured interviews conducted at a financial institution, the study explores how employees interpret, navigate, and shape the discourse of agility in their everyday work. The analysis draws on insights from discourse theory, sensemaking, identity regulation, and normative control to examine how strategic ideals are encountered, adapted, and contested in practice.
Findings reveal that while agility is symbolically elevated as essential for future-readiness, employees experience its demands as ambiguous, unevenly applied, and sometimes contradictory. Agility functions not only as a guiding principle but also as a normative discourse that shapes expectations of who employees should be and how they should act. These dynamics create tensions between aspirational narratives and practical constraints, surfacing moments of compliance, reinterpretation, and subtle forms of resistance. The thesis introduces a range of employee responses to agility discourse and reflects on the implications for leadership, organizational identity, and future change efforts.
By reorienting attention from what agility is to how it is made meaningful in context, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of discursive control in contemporary organizations. It also offers practical insights for leaders and policymakers seeking to foster agility in ways that align strategic ambitions with the lived realities of employees. (Less)
Please use this url to cite or link to this publication:
http://lup.lub.lu.se/student-papers/record/9197898
- author
- Lagoute, Britta LU and van der Zaag, Minne Jowien LU
- supervisor
- organization
- course
- BUSN49 20251
- year
- 2025
- type
- H1 - Master's Degree (One Year)
- subject
- keywords
- Organizational Agility, Discourse Theory, Identity, Normative Control, Sensemaking, Resistance, Financial Sector, Strategic Change, Qualitative Research, Interpretive Case Study
- language
- English
- id
- 9197898
- date added to LUP
- 2025-06-23 09:43:32
- date last changed
- 2025-06-23 09:43:32
@misc{9197898,
abstract = {{Agility has emerged as a strategic ideal across many sectors, especially within financial institutions facing heightened pressure to respond swiftly to technological disruption, regulatory shifts, and market volatility. While commonly positioned as a solution to organizational inertia, agility is often promoted through leadership programs and strategic narratives that assume a shared understanding among employees. Yet, how agility is interpreted and enacted at the individual level remains underexplored. This thesis investigates how employees within a financial institution understand, negotiate, and shape the discourse of agility, and what consequences these interpretations produce for identity, behavior, and organizational dynamics.
While the analysis is guided by discourse theory, the study employs an interpretive case study design to explore how employees make sense of agility in practice. Addressing a gap in existing literature, which often treats agility as either a strategic capability or a managerial fashion, this research shifts attention to how agility is meaningful in everyday work life. Drawing on seventeen semi-structured interviews conducted at a financial institution, the study explores how employees interpret, navigate, and shape the discourse of agility in their everyday work. The analysis draws on insights from discourse theory, sensemaking, identity regulation, and normative control to examine how strategic ideals are encountered, adapted, and contested in practice.
Findings reveal that while agility is symbolically elevated as essential for future-readiness, employees experience its demands as ambiguous, unevenly applied, and sometimes contradictory. Agility functions not only as a guiding principle but also as a normative discourse that shapes expectations of who employees should be and how they should act. These dynamics create tensions between aspirational narratives and practical constraints, surfacing moments of compliance, reinterpretation, and subtle forms of resistance. The thesis introduces a range of employee responses to agility discourse and reflects on the implications for leadership, organizational identity, and future change efforts.
By reorienting attention from what agility is to how it is made meaningful in context, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of discursive control in contemporary organizations. It also offers practical insights for leaders and policymakers seeking to foster agility in ways that align strategic ambitions with the lived realities of employees.}},
author = {{Lagoute, Britta and van der Zaag, Minne Jowien}},
language = {{eng}},
note = {{Student Paper}},
title = {{Just Be Agile - Decoding Agility in the Financial Sector}},
year = {{2025}},
}