Track: Graduate Student Paper Competition

Abstract

The strive to sustain excellence within organizations has increased with the constant change in customer demands and toughening of competition. With these rapid changes occurring, the need for organizations to be agile has become a significant element in their operation schemes to sustain the excellence and be future-ready. This need raises the question of the relationship between organizational excellence and agility. Various models and frameworks have been developed to achieve excellence and agility in organizations. However, limited studies have correlated the two. This research investigates the relationship between excellence and agility within organizations and develops an assessment correlation index matrix between the two domains. That will help organizations understand their states in agility and excellence. The out-take for an organization is to know its categorization in the correlation model (beginner, master, conservative or fashionist) and determine the under-achieving pillars in each domain. The results of the study have shown that there is a high positive correlation between the two domains in both the public and private organizations. Although while one would expect that private organizations would have higher correlation between the two domains, it has been observed in this study that public organizations within the UAE have shown higher correlation data. This could be attributed to the fact that the Government of the UAE has introduced various initiatives since the 90’s that encouraged public organizations to implement excellence models such as DQA and SKEA. Moreover, the study has shown that regardless of the size of the company, the correlation between agility and excellence is highly positive.