Agile governance theory: operationalization
Agile governance has emerged as a relatively new, wide, and multidisciplinary area focused on organizational performance and competitiveness, which until recently had lacked in depth exploration. Aiming to reduce this gap, we recently proposed the Agile Governance Theory to analyze and describe its phenomena, and provide a better understanding of how agility in business can establish effective and responsive governance. This paper describes the process of transposing the theory from a conceptual framework to the real world and developing the necessary measurement elements to test it. We operationalize the emerging theory according to the four remaining steps of part two of Dubin's method: identifying its propositions, deriving empirical indicators from its constructs, and establishing testable hypotheses. We operationalized the emerging theory by: (1) depicting eight theoretical scenarios that help characterize and describe organizational contexts in the real world, (2) recognizing 11 propositions that allow us to predict the behavior of its elements, (3) identifying 24 empirical indicators to measure its constructs, and (4) developing 16 hypotheses to test the theory as a further study. We operationalize the theory to allow real world empirical testing based on this work, as further study is necessary to assess the theory's plausibility. We also make improvements and additions to the methodological approach for theory building research (including Dubin's Method) extending it to a multimethod approach.
Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering