The Effect of Complexity Leadership on Organizational Agility : Focusing on the Serial Multiple Mediation of Psychological Empowerment and Collaborative Learning

In the past, strategies, technical capabilities, and IT systems were mainly studied asantecedents factors that affect organizational agility. However, there is a lack of relativelyhuman-centered research. Recently, Korean companies focused mainly on the change of organizationalstructure and the introduction of the system as a way to enhance organizational agility. Rather, thereis a case of increasing the resistance of employees to change. This situation is increasing the necessityof research on enhancing organizational agility through employee-centered processes such as newleader’s roles, internal motivation and collaborative learning.Therefore, this study attempted to verify the serial multi mediated effects of psychologicalempowerment and collaborative learning in the process of complexity leadership on organizationalagility. In order to minimize the convenience of the common method bias caused by the self-reportquestionnaire, the dependent variables were measured with time lag, and job affect(positive andnegative affect) and working time with the leader were applied as control variables. To test thehypothesis, we analyzed 303 questionnaires obtained from office workers working in 22 companiesin various industries with more than 300 employees. The results of the analysis are as follows: First, complexity leadership has a positive effecton organizational agility. Second, the mediating effect of psychological empowerment was notsignificant between complexity leadership and organizational agility. Third, collaborative learningbetween complexity leadership and organizational agility has a positive mediating effect. Fourth,psychological empowerment and collaborative learning between the complexity leadership andorganizational agility have positive serial multiple mediation effects.This study empirically verifies the mechanism of complexity leadership on psychological empowerment and collaborative learning. In addition, as a leadership that can have a significant effecton organizational agility, it is meaningful to expand leadership research by proposing complexityleadership, which lacked empirical research in Korea, and suggested theoretical and practicalimplications and suggestions for future research.