Identifying and Ranking Factors Affecting Organizational Behavioral Agility in Higher Education Using Meta-synthesis and Group Hierarchical Analysis

Organizational agility is one of the issues that explain its different dimensions and angles in different Organizations, providing a favorable place for their growth and performance at different levels. The purpose of this paper was to identify and rank the factors affecting organizational behavior agility in the higher education sector by applying meta-synthesis technique and group hierarchical analysis. In the first part, by applying meta-synthesis technique, 120 articles were chosen after screening 481 articles, the dimensions and factors of organizational behavior agility were identified. The four main and final dimensions of organizational behavior agility were: education, culture, knowledge, and employee’s ability. Then, in the quantitative section, these dimensions, together with the sub-criteria obtained from the previous section, were put together in the form of a decision tree and ranked and weighted using expert opinions and hierarchical analysis techniques, which were of the utmost importance. It was related to the dimension of weight training (0.374) and then other dimensions of organizational behavioral agility were knowledge (0.222), employees’ ability (0.221), culture (0.182). The obtained dimensions for organizational behavioral agility were compared with the dimensions of organizational agility reference models with behavioral perspective.