ABSTRACT
Organizational agility has quickly become a vital component of successful business management, given the highly dynamic modern world in which we live. This chapter explores and summarizes CEO characteristics, such as personality and other individual differences that promote organizational agility. We begin with a review of organizational agility performance imperatives (OAPIs) across various domains (e.g., cognitive, social, political). Next, we review key CEO characteristics that are necessary to enable leaders to meet these OAPIs. We group these into cognitive capacities, social capacities, and personality and motives. In doing so, we review and summarize the extant literature on how and why these sets of characteristics promote organizational agility among CEOs and other top management leaders. Finally, we suggest future research directions in the measurement of organizational agility as a criterion, more complex multivariate and process models of individual differences, and profile or person-centered models of how individual differences interact in compilational patterns.
