IT-Enabled Organizational Agility and Firms' Sustainable Competitive Advantage

By reflecting on the polymorphous aspects of firms’ strategic responses to environmental dynamics, we differentiate two distinctive types of agility, namely, entrepreneurial agility (anticipating and proactive) and adaptive agility (sensing and reactive). In this light, we investigate how and why firms’ IT and operational capabilities can enable these two types of agility, thereby leading to sustainable competitive advantage. To empirically validate the proposed model, we conducted a large-scale field survey with multiple respondents in China, an emerging economy with a large variance in market uncertainty and IT maturity among companies. The results indicate that specific complementary relationships between IT and operational capabilities are the significant driving forces of each type of agility. The two types of agility are also found to be significant in leading to sustainable competitive advantage while their impacts differ. This study provides a better understanding of the strategic role of IT in contemporary businesses.