the quarterly essay

Librarians/Admins

• EBSCOhost Collection Manager
• EBSCO Experience Manager
• EBSCO Connect
• Start your research
• EBSCO Mobile App

Clinical Decisions Users

• DynaMed Decisions
• Dynamic Health
• Waiting Rooms
• NoveList Blog

The Quarterly Essay

Quarterly Essay presents significant contributions to the general debate. Each issue contains a single essay written at a length of about 25,000 words. It aims to present the widest range of political, intellectual and cultural opinion.

Get a digital magazine subscription of The Quarterly Essay for your library, school or business which your patrons, students or employees can read on-the-go.

Please note: Flipster is a subscription service for libraries, schools and corporations and is not intended for individual use. Check with your local library to see if they offer Flipster digital magazines.

Publisher : Schwartz Publishing Pty Ltd.

ISSN: 1444-884X; 1832-0953

Categories: News, Politics & Social Issues; Literary

* Not all titles are available in all markets.

Not a Flipster customer?

Request Information

Articles on Quarterly Essay

Displaying all articles.

Outrage is a key performance indicator for Peter Dutton, the ‘bad cop’ of politics. But what does he value?

Judith Brett , La Trobe University

Australia’s ‘deeply unfair’ housing system is in crisis – and our politicians are failing us

Laurence Troy , University of Sydney

‘I want to get bogged at a beach in my wheelchair and know people will help’. Micheline Lee on the way forward for the NDIS

Helen Dickinson , UNSW Sydney

The larrikin lives on — as a conservative politician

Frank Bongiorno , Australian National University

The art of distraction: Sebastian Smee’s Quarterly Essay

Stephanie Trigg , The University of Melbourne

Partially right: rejecting neoliberalism shouldn’t mean giving up on social liberalism

Richard Holden , UNSW Sydney and Rosalind Dixon , UNSW Sydney

Two new books show there’s still no goodbye to messy climate politics

Marc Hudson , University of Manchester

When Australia goes to war, public trust depends on better oversight

James Brown , University of Sydney

Review: Political Amnesia – How We Forgot How To Govern

Nicholas Barry , La Trobe University

Review: Faction Man – Bill Shorten’s Path to Power

Geoffrey Robinson , Deakin University

Much ado Abbott nothing: Marr’s Quarterly Essay misses the mark

John Warhurst , Australian National University

Related Topics

• Bill Shorten
• Book reviews
• Capital gains
• Chilcot Inquiry
• Political history
• Tony Abbott

Top contributors

Emeritus Professor of Political Science, Australian National University

Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University

Lecturer, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University

Emeritus Professor of Politics, La Trobe University

Professor of Economics, UNSW Sydney

Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor of English Literature, The University of Melbourne

Professor of History, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University

Director, Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law, UNSW Sydney, UNSW Sydney

Visiting Fellow, SPRU, University of Sussex Business School, University of Sussex

Adjunct Associate Professor and Research Director, US Studies Centre, University of Sydney

Professor, Public Service Research, UNSW Sydney

Senior Lecturer in Urbanism, University of Sydney

• X (Twitter)
• Unfollow topic Follow topic

• International edition
• Australia edition
• Europe edition

Australian housing wealth is meaningless, destructive and fundamentally changing our society

High-priced homes do not create wealth, Alan Kohler says, they redistribute it. Now financial success is largely a function of geography, not accomplishment

• Alan Kohler on how housing policy entrenches inequality – Australian politics podcast
• Get our weekend culture and lifestyle email

My parents were married in 1951 and, with a war service loan, bought a block of land in South Oakleigh, eight miles from Melbourne’s central business district.

I don’t know what my dad was making then, but apparently the average wage in 1951 was about 6 pounds, 11 shillings a week, or £341 a year. And judging by average prices back then, they would have paid about £1,000 for the land. (By the way, the median house price had more than doubled in 1950, recovering from the big fall caused by price controls during the second world war, on which more later.)

Dad was a carpenter and built the house himself, including making the bricks, working on weekends and at night, and Mum and Dad lived in a garage, to which I was brought home when I was born and where I spent the first three years of my life. But if they had bought a house and land package, which was rather more common than building it yourself, they would have paid about £1,250. So, like the median family at the time, they would have paid about 3.5 times household income (Mum didn’t work) for their first house, which was about average for the time.

When my wife and I bought our first house, in 1980, we paid roughly the median house price of $40,000, and I was making around the average weekly earnings as a young journalist – $220 a week, or $11,500 a year. So we also paid about 3.5 times my salary for the house, although we were better off than my parents because my wife was working, for about the same salary as mine, and my mum didn’t, which was normal for both times. Workforce participation for 30-year-old women had increased from 32% to 50% by 1980, as a result of the social/sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s.

Over the past four years our three children and their partners all bought their own first houses. They’re doing it later than we did, and much later than my parents, so they’re making better money, and both partners are working, of course, but they paid about 7.5 times each income for their houses. That is typical: in August 2023 the median Australian house price was $732,886, which was 7.4 times annualised average weekly earnings.

In other words, my children – and all young people today – are paying more than twice the multiple of their income for a house than their parents – and their grandparents – did, and it’s only vaguely possible because both partners work to pay it off.

The problem started with the new millennium.

It is impossible to overstate the significance to Australian society of what happened then. The shift that began in about 2000 in the relationship between the cost of housing and both average incomes and the rest of the economy has altered everything about the way Australia operates and Australians live.

Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning

Six per cent compound annual growth in the value of houses over the past 23 years versus 3% annual growth in average incomes has meant that household debt has had to increase from half to twice average disposable income, and from 40% of GDP to 120%. This is the most important single fact about the Australian economy . The large amount of housing debt Australians carry means that interest rates have a much greater impact on their lives, and this in turn affects inflation, wages, employment and economic growth. In the Australian economy, the price of houses is not everything but it’s almost everything, as the economist Paul Krugman once said of productivity.

Land and energy are the two basic economic inputs apart from labour, but while Australia has more of both than just about any other country, we export most of the energy and price our own at global parity, so there’s no homegrown advantage there, and we crowd into a few cities and pay each other seven to eight times our salaries for land.

High-priced houses do not create wealth; they redistribute it. And it’s meaningless because we can’t use the wealth to buy anything else – a yacht or a fast car. We can only buy other expensive houses: sell your house and you have to buy another one, cheaper if you’re downsizing, more expensive if you’re still growing a family. At the end of your life, your children get to use your housing wealth for their own housing, except that we’re all living so much longer these days it’s usually too late to be useful. And much of this housing wealth is concentrated in Sydney, where the median house value is $1.1m, double that of Perth and regional Australia.

It’s destructive because of the inequality that results: with so much wealth concentrated in the home, it stays with those who already own a house and within their families. For someone with little or no family housing equity behind them, it’s virtually impossible to break out of the cycle and build new wealth.

after newsletter promotion

It will be impossible to return the price of housing to something less destructive – preferably to what it was when my parents and I bought our first houses – without purging the idea that housing is a means to create wealth as opposed to simply a place to live.

That’s easier said than done, as China’s president, Xi Jinping, has found. He has been banging on about this for five years, saying that housing is not for speculation but for living in, but no one seems to be listening in China, and no one would be listening here either if the prime minister was saying the same thing. But anyway, he’s not.

The growth in the value of Australian land has fundamentally changed society in two ways. First, generations of young Australians are being held back financially by the cost of shelter, especially if they live somewhere near a CBD and especially in Sydney or Melbourne; and second, the way wealth is generated has changed. Education and hard work are no longer the main determinants of how wealthy you are; now it comes down to where you live and what sort of house you inherit from your parents.

It means Australia is less of an egalitarian meritocracy. Material success is now largely a function of geography, not accomplishment. Moreover, the geographic wealth gap is being widened by climate change, as floods and bushfires make living in large parts of the country uninsurable and financially crippling, but many families have no choice except to stay where they are because those areas are low-priced and they can’t afford to move.

The houses we live in, the places we call home and bring up our families in, have been turned into speculative investment assets by the 50 years of government policy failure, financialisation and greed that resulted in 25 years of exploding house prices. The doubling of prices as a proportion of both average income and GDP per capita has turned a house from somewhere to live while you get on with the rest of your life into the main thing, and for many people a terrible burden.

This article was amended on 28 November 2023 to correct a miscalculation of the average annual wage of a carpenter in 1951.

This is an edited extract of Alan Kohler’s Quarterly Essay, The Great Divide: Australia’s housing mess and how to fix it , published on Monday

• Australian economy
• Wages growth

Most viewed

WRITING & PUBLISHING

Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein on writing Quarterly Essays

Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein are the two most recent authors of Quarterly Essays. Jess released The Reckoning: How #MeToo Is Changing Australia in late 2021, and Sarah released Not Waving, Drowning: Mental illness and Vulnerability in Australia in early 2022. Quarterly Essays are prestigious, but they are notoriously difficult and always come with intense time pressure. In this interview, Jess and Sarah discuss how they did it and why they signed up for it.

Jess  is an investigative journalist and the author of See What You Made Me Do . She has been a producer for ABC Radio and journalist for Background Briefing , and Middle East correspondent for  The Global Mail . Her reporting on domestic abuse has won two Walkley awards, an Amnesty International award and three Our Watch awards.  See What You Made Me Do  won the 2020 Stella Prize and the ABA Booksellers’ Choice Adult Non-Fiction Book of the Year.

Sarah  is the multi-award-winning author of  The Trauma Cleaner and  The Believer .  Her writing has appeared in magazines and journals in Australia, the United Kingdom and America. She holds a doctorate in criminal law.

ASTRID: Welcome Jess Hill and Sarah Krasnostein. I can't believe the two of you are appearing together on The Garret.

JESS: Here we are.

SARAH: Today.

JESS: Thank you both for joining us. And today I want to be really nerdy, which works for The Garrett and The Garret's audience. I want to talk about the Quarterly Essays now.

Jess Hill, you wrote your first Quarterly Essay last year, published at the end of 2021, about #MeToo. And Sarah, you have just released your first Quarterly Essay about mental illness and vulnerability. I'd like to ask both of you, what does a Quarterly Essay represent? And why have you both put yourself through the sheer horror and pain and suffering of writing one?

Jess, yours was published first, so we'll start with you.

JESS: Oh, I've already gone through part of the amnesia process, because it's been several months since I finished it. Look, I've always been a fan of the Quarterly Essay format, partly because it's substantial enough to be a thorough investigation of a topic, but it doesn't carry the pressure of a book because it's only around for a few months. Well, unless you write a classic.

And to be honest, Chris Feik from Schwartz had been asking me to write a Quarterly for a while and I sort of had been resisting because there's just a lot going on. And then, then he said, ‘Well. Like, okay, what about #MeToo? Write about #MeToo’. And I'm like, ‘Okay’.

So as usual, like my life just kind of carries me along this drift. Because people asked me to do things. It wasn't burning inside me to write a Quarterly Essay about the #MeToo movement. And much like when I wrote about domestic abuse for the first time, I actually was a bit like, ‘Oh, what am I going to spend 20 to 40,000 words writing about #MeToo? Hasn't it all been written? It's something that's been flogged to death, this subject’. And sure enough, within days, you realise, well actually, as usual, it has been written about a lot, but certain narratives have solidified that really need messing with and reinterrogating. Of course you could actually write that much just on the last 12 months in Australia, let alone the developing weather system that exploded into me too. So I wish I could say, ‘Oh, this has been formulating in my mind for months and finally I got the opportunity to put it on paper’. I wish I was like a more meaningful person sometimes like that, when really a lot of the time I'm just a hack who's been asked to write something.

SARAH: You have to refer to that as negative capability, Jess. You are a meaningful person, you're just waiting to use it.

JESS: That's right. I think my internalised self-critic stops me being a deeply meaningful person on that level of driving forward. It's just like, ‘Oh, they think I'm good enough to write about that. Okay. I guess I will’.

ASTRID: Look Jess, being thought of as good enough to write a Quarterly Essay is a compliment. But also Sarah, and I are both going to make you leave behind or put aside for now your self-deprecating way and really embrace the fact that you are one of the authors of a Quarterly Essay that has written a classic, right? No, one's going to forget the Quarterly Essay on #MeToo.

JESS: Oh, thanks Astrid.

ASTRID: And Sarah, you now have also written a Quarterly Essay. It just has hit the shelves. You went in knowing this was a tough gig. Why and how?

SARAH: I wrongly, as it would turn out, thought this would be refreshing sorbet between books. I thought, ‘Oh, like that's not book long. That's fine. You can't really go past 40,000 words. And it's an essay. I love an essay. So I'll do that between my last book and disappearing into the next one’. And I was a 100 per cent wrong about the refreshing palette cleansing character of what this is. But at the same time, everything about it is quirky.

So the style notes that you get from Chris are a word discursive document about... [Laughter] A very loose dos and don'ts. And I am such a nerd that when I read these notes, I teared up because it is the ideal form for me to take. It's noteworthy in its lack of prescription on the format. Apart from that there shouldn't be too strident a policy analysis, which is the reason why I left my legal work. And it should be the largest possible view of a current issue. You have the freedom to do that in a formally inventive way or not, or whatever, as long as you're coming at it originally in the substance, and the form is flexible enough to allow you to do that.

Wonderful, very touching, poignant, lovely. And then there's the horror of that degree of freedom when you're just trying to come up with something original. And it's a lot.

ASTRID: I've previously spoken to others who have written Quarterly Essays, including Ben Law. And everybody seems a little bit shell shocked afterwards because of the intense time period that all the research has to happen. A Quarterly Essay is of course published four times a year, and you can't push the deadline back in any significant manner.

You both are writing about nuanced and complicated areas of life. You are also writing about them two years into a global pandemic that has directly impacted the subject matter that you are writing about. How does that change your approach? So for example, rates of domestic abuse. Potentially terrifying when we think about lockdowns in Australia, Jess, and I don't know a single person whose mental health is as good as it once was, particularly in Melbourne that experienced the very long lockdowns. So when you are putting out such a document, how do you even place it in the context of a global pandemic?

JESS: It's been interesting the way that #MeToo had such a resurgence in Australia right in the middle of COVID. We were so stuck within our four walls, and even when we weren't in technical lockdown, everything was pretty much lockdown. There was so little interaction. And yet there was, in terms of the so-called women's movement or women's issues, this massive public reckoning. And very public. On the streets and are coming together and are dividing apart. And all these things was going on at a time when we weren't even really seeing each other in person, which flavours it in a way, because it's easier to objectify people, even from within your own movement or on your own side, for want of a better word, when you don't see them in person for a couple of years. So, you can start to get very heady about things and not drop into the humanity of it.

When it came to writing about it, I don't think I was really conscious of placing it within the conditions that we were in. Because I think with the Quarterly , even though it is transient in its format, I also think you're writing a historical record. So that was really, for me, the most important thing was to write a clear... And as Sarah's saying, like do it from the broadest possible view... Record how #MeToo came about, or my personal view on that, because there will be a million different interpretations of that, and then how it bounced through Australia to what it became in 2021 and how it exploded in Parliament. And so that for me was more important.

I have to say also is that as personally, just coming off the back of a lot of work. The SBS series had just finished earlier in the year, then I did a podcast series and there was no break in between at all. And I was pretty burnt out. And poor Chris and everybody at Black Inc, I feel like I owe just unrelenting gifts because from the time that I started writing, I had seven weeks until print. I submitted the last chapter the night before we went to print! So in a way, that rushed, very rushed, very quick period of writing and editing meant that I couldn't get too carried away with even placing it in any context. It had to roar out of me, and I had to not make any mistakes.

I'm sure Sarah had this too, that thing of being so responsible for people's not just individual stories, but the stories that unite so many stories. You have a lot of responsibility to get that right. You have a lot of responsibility for your sources. A lot of my focus was just on how can I make sure that I am doing the best by the people who are named in this essay, and that I am representing the people who are not, and who have not been platformed. And the rest was just like cross fingers and hope.

ASTRID: Your topic is slightly different, Sarah, and you do draw the linkage between mental health and Jess's essay. For example, instances of mental ill health turn up in the system, first and foremost, through instances of violence in the home. What do the two of you think – and I know you didn't pre-plan this, Jess, I don't think you would've known whose essay was coming after you – but what is the statement of two Quarterly Essays coming out that are about not traditional policy issues, not traditional men's business, if I can be so broad as to label it like that? We're talking about women, we're talking about #Metoo, we're talking about mental health, which affects everybody but is so often stigmatised and not admitted to. What is the cumulative impact of two Quarterly Essays ?

SARAH: Well, I've been thinking about not this exact question, but these issues for something else I'm working on, which is much more creative writing, but I think the point transposed as well onto that question.

One of my many bug bears is a focus on the discourse, national history, or the sections of a newspaper along entirely arbitrary, and now canonical lines, so there is such a thing as ‘economics’ or ‘economic history’ or ‘political history’ or ‘military history’, when it's all social history. And it is all inexorably co-created, relationally sourced issues manifesting in different parts of our institutional collective life. So I think it's not inevitable in the sense that nothing's really inevitable, but it makes sense to me that there would be two gal writers having a go at examining our collective life through the prisms that Jess and I have chosen to look at a very complex – I'm trying to phrase this without swearing –

ASTRID: You're allowed to swear.

SARAH: – clusterfuck of national policies through our chosen lenses… That I think the significance. Rather than writing more abstractly about politics as a separate entity or international patterns or relations separately, we are looking quite clearly at what we value and the gaps between our national rhetoric and our enduring collective behavioural patterns, whether they manifest as seemingly intractable patterns of interpersonal violence in the home or the workplace (where the overwhelming majority, but certainly not all victims are female), or whether it manifests also in the home, but in our public life and in our criminal justice system, in our educational system, in our healthcare system, as this kind of compulsively repeated pattern of caring about fixing these problems only so much and no further.

So that's a very long way of not answering the question, I apologise.

JESS: Oh, that's really made me think a lot just when you were talking there, Sarah, about Martha Gellhorn, who was one of my sort of original journalistic heroes. And for those who haven't heard of Martha, one of the first female war correspondence, very much of her own making, known for instead of reporting the ‘game of war’ and what's going through the minds of the strategists and the high profile commanders, she got like right down onto the street and with the people. And particularly the story about the invasion of Finland where she's like... It was really a different way of doing war reporting. And I think that through the prism of what people might see as the softer – not softer in terms of their impact, but the sort of like more touchy feeling of feminine issues like mental illness or domestic abuse, or #MeToo, is that actually, as you say, you are talking about very serious political and policy issues, but you're coming through the prism of human experience rather than keeping it in this sort of unreachable cerebral level. But there is still very much a contest of ideas, but making sure that it doesn't get separate from the grassroots, from the actual experience of the living people who are subject to the whims and fancies of all these great thinkers and strategic masterminds and politicians.

Sometimes I think the more feminine issues, what they do is actually just bring us back to Earth and give us a better chance at finding better solutions than just talking at the policy level.

SARAH: And I think it's also a way of short circuiting a lot of the debate about issues on which we have too much empirical data for this to be a debate. It goes straight to the human heart of the matter. It's the so what of these potentially rarefied debates about what it looks like to do institutional reform in late stage capitalism, blah, blah blah. So what? How does it impact us on a daily basis in the home, all of us together? That makes a something much more pressing.

JESS: When we continually relate it back to the grassroots, it also takes those academic ideas about reform or about smashing systems or about... I think when you are really reporting from that level of the personal, you have to take those ideas through to their end point. Like okay, if we were to do this really interesting reform, how would it affect X, Y, ?. Or if we were to just forget reforming the system, because the system is so entirely buggered, what is the actual effect of that? Because I think we can get stuck – I mean, everywhere in the world, but we can get really stuck in these academic sort of niches and new sort of normal niche comes along that academics and thinkers want to explore, but can so often be disconnected from. Well, how would that actually work in reality? Instead of just like, how does it make us feel or how interesting is it to explore?

SARAH: Yeah.

ASTRID: I don't think I would be able to find a reader of either of your Quarterly Essays who didn't feel and understand and empathise with what you're writing about. But the Quarterly Essay is a niche audience, Quarterly Essays aren't read by everyone. And so a question for both of you. Who is the audience of the Quarterly Essay ?

JESS: There is the subscriber base. So there's the rusted ons, about 9,000 or 10,000 people. And then it's really, I think, a matter of who do you reach with it? There are obviously people who are going to be more inclined to buy a journal of this kind, just exploring ideas. They're probably more likely to be the Radio National audience, for example. God bless the a Radio National audience. But what I found really interesting is – especially going to events in the last few weeks, and one in particular at the Adelaide Writers Festival, where I appeared with Grace Tame – is that when it came to the signing line, these were not just standard Quarterly Essay readers. And in fact, many said they'd never bought a Quarterly Essay and were now really interested in finding out more about it. I had high school girls buying the Quarterly Essay . Teachers. So sometimes, I think the Quarterly Essay audience is to an extent what you can make it and to an extent related to the topic. So when Alan Finkel writes about are getting to zero emissions, he's going to get a different audience to the audience that me and Sarah are going to get for our essays. And fortunately, writers festivals and other institutions are quite keen to promote Quarterly Essays , like they've got a reasonable amount of status. So yeah, sometimes it's just about what can you generate and what audience can you generate?

Sarah: The thing that's always struck me about it is how it punches above its weight, not just with the leadership, but with the potential influence, if it resonates in a certain way. It can set an agenda in more daily newspapers, for or against, whatever. It gets topics ventilated outside a rarefied circle. So, I mean, I like a rarefied circle very much, don't get me wrong. But if you want to do this professionally, you can't just live there. So it is the best of both worlds in that sense. It first has to pass through a very considered, particularly literary, I want to say, or engaged audience before it gets into the discourse more generally (if it's going to do so).

JESS: That's, that's a really good point. I think because there are some journals that do tend to remain much more within the readership, like sometimes the Griffith Review and other journals. It'll be very rare for them to go outside of their known audiences, but because the Quarterly Essay is topical, it becomes news just by being a quarterly. And yeah, like I mean, extracts go in the paper. And I think if we look at these things as a system, that even if people don't actually read the whole essay, that they'll probably engage with some of the ideas that were presented in it, through all of these other... Through your podcast, and through the ways in which it's promoted.

ASTRID: This is a podcast for writers, and I often speak to writers about how they represent the viewpoints and the voices of others. I want to ask you that, but before we get there, I want to just stay on the Quarterly Essay topic. Because the Quarterly Essay is a thing, sometimes rarefied, sometimes breaking out to a whole lot of a wider audience. What does it take to get selected to be the writer of a Quarterly Essay ? Because I feel like that's a rarefied list. And if I can insert myself with an opinion here, it is changing over time, the list of who gets to write a Quarterly Essay . So my question to you both is, who gets to write a Quarterly Essay, and why do you think you were picked?

Jess, you're laughing at me. I know there's thorny things in there.

JESS: No, no, nothing. Nothing particularly thorny. Who gets picked? There's a very large conversation about who gets chosen to represent the intellectual side of Australia. And this is not to cast shade on Schwartz, but more just how that landscape gets created in general. The list is still pretty overwhelmingly white. That needs work. You know, when I was a producer at the ABC, you needed to really consciously... I actually needed to consciously when I was putting panels together, make sure that they were 50 per cent women represented because 10 years ago that was actually the work that needed to be done. And now there is much more work to be done that is close to the surface.

I think that the Quarterly Essay , it strikes me that it is a pretty rare person that writes long form in Australia and long form journalism. You do have to have the experience, and I guess some runs on the board to be able to write something like this in such a short period of time. I couldn't have written this before I wrote my book, I think that was a really great sort of staging ground. I know other writers of Quarterly Essays who maybe haven't written a book before have been really shocked at how hardcore it is. And I guess to an extent, there needs to be some name recognition, I think, because the Quarterly Essay does, as Sarah saying, try to set a bit of an agenda. So some expertise in the area that you're writing about or some name recognition. But yeah, aside from that, I don't know.

SARAH: I would second all that. And I think that observation just about kind of the dearth of spaces to write at length factually and creatively is not something that we really have a lot of. And if it's the length that you are... My background was academic immediately before I wrote my first book, and I would get more scared by 1,200 words than 40,000 words, which is my length. And I enjoy having the space to do that. And even in the compressed kind of deadline, it's still time to let the issues aerate and marinate, and it's a really unique space. So, I think it does select people that have that experience and are sufficiently masochistic that they are enthusiastic about doing it.

But I agree also, Astrid, that it is changing over time. I mean, when I think back to my favourite ones before it even occurred to me that I too might throw my hat in the ring for it, it was Anna Krien – both of her’s, but particularly the live export market, Jess's now, and the observations from Rebecca Huntley. And I'm not looking for the gal writers specifically, I'm looking at these topics and also the way in which most of them were written. So I have other ones that I really enjoyed as well, but what I can tell you off the top of my head, these were the ones that made me think that I too would be good at doing that, or at least capable of asking, of pitching without having a laugh come back. They are the female ones. But yes, I agree. The diversity issue does need to be addressed.

JESS: I think also there's obviously a crossover with Black Inc authors and the Quarterly Essay , although after what I put the team through with See What You Made Me Do around deadline, they should have known it would be probably repeated.

It was interesting seeing Lech Blaine's essay that came before mine. That's not a diversity on a cultural level, but on a class level, it represents something very different for the Quarterly Essay . Having come from writing memoir –  memoir that obviously is doing a lot more heavy lifting than just telling a story with car crash, talking about masculinity and so many other things, and trauma – his style of writing the Quarterly Essay was very unlike almost any Quarterly Essay that came before it.

You know, he wrote quite consciously on and off in ‘Boganese’. It was very much writing... Almost like Gonzo writing on lyricism. The whole writing style is lyricism. And I was really inspired by what he did with the form, which was very different. Coming from a very working class background brought a totally different sensibility. I think that was really... I would love to see more chances taken on people who don't come out of the mould. I don't think myself or Sarah come out of a mould per se, but I think that Lech was the furthest outside what you would expect as an author of a Quarterly Essay .

SARAH: That is such a good point, Jess. I think that it also speaks to a new way of looking at Australian history that is the thread that the last... Well, I think like you can trace in the last two, two or three years worth of Quarterly Essays . It's a new way of looking at what in the world are the enduring persisting patterns that takes it out of where... To whom those traditional modes of history and historical debate have been assigned. As, you know, ‘This is the way of looking at credible academic or scholarly history’.

Lech is a perfect example of that, seeing these continuities, these patterns, these values, their expression, how it falls on the ear, how we are meant to understand things said and things meant. He brings all of his particular background characteristics to understanding that and illuminating that terrain. So I think that's another kind of subtle trend.

ASTRID: Another thing about the Quarterly Essay is the correspondence at the end and the right of reply. So Sarah, this hasn't happened to you yet, but it will in about three months.

JESS: You wait.

ASTRID: In your essay, Sarah, there are letters published in response to Jess's previous essay. And of course your right of reply, Jess. So, two questions. Firstly, how does that feel personally, because this is not something common in widely available non-fiction published in Australia, the fact that you reprint the supporting or opposing views? And what is the role of that correspondence in the Quarterly Essay ?

JESS:  You know, I was having a chat to Anthony Lowenstein about something kind of corollary to this yesterday. And it was about sort of the dearth of intellectual disagreement amongst Australian writers, particularly at writers festivals, which is both, I think, a symptom of how Australia has become quite anti-intellectual, and also of the fact that many on the Right who get platformed fall into a pretty narrow band of culture warriors. I think the so-called Right or conservative media has become pretty bad at platforming its intellectuals, because that wasn't what was getting bang for their buck.  So there's a paucity there. And of course, writers festivals, they're a bit of a circuit and getting writers to come across for $300 a session, coming interstate, I guess maybe some writers would be turned off if they were heading into a sparring match. But there is that sort of... As you say, there's not a lot of space for disagreement. And even in reviews it can be that you find that person writing the review of that other person's book, they're friends, they're mates. It's a very small writing community. So what's great about the Quarterly Essay correspondence. It's not that you have some sparring match at the back, but it's that it is encouraged. This is not going to risk your connection with that person, that we are supposed to be interrogating the ideas. It's not personal. It'd be great if there was more of it.

Now, when it came to the correspondence to mine, most of it was just lovely. I was really lucky. I was really wondering like, ‘Oh, what's this going to be like?’ And some of it was... Certainly some of it interrogated things I hadn't managed to interrogate, and added new things that I hadn't even thought of.

The only real challenge came from Janet Albrechtsen. And I really wanted that challenge to be nuanced and sophisticated. I wanted that even against my own better knowledge. And look, there were parts. But again, it was just in that culture warrior frame where it felt like to engage with it critically was being sucked into that vortex. And even points that she made that just, given a bit more thought, would've had more meat on their bones just came across quite shallow. Such as, ‘If I'd been a more curious writer, I would've looked at how certain people, read women, have taken advantage of the #MeToo movement for their own ends’. There's a point to be made there about how #MeToo can be used in all different ways, but the inference there is really clear that it would be women who are trying to corner men. I think we've seen from both sides various types of ways that me too has been weaponized. But not really so much in terms of false allegations – in fact, that was more heralded as a likelihood by people like Janet and her ilk, and didn't come to fruition, not in any high profile way that we've seen. So there was just things like that where I thought, ‘A bit more thinking in this response would make this a really interesting sort of debate’. But instead I feel like I didn't really even give what you are saying that much attention because you're coming at it from a warrior perspective and it's really boring.

So there's a bit... I think what the correspondence does, even when it's not disagreeing or trying to spar, is it does bring out your blind spots. And I thought it was a great response to Lech's essay before mine from Allison Pennington, really talking about his focus on male larrikin figures and where were the female larrikin? Where was the Julia Gillards, those sorts of figures? And that was a blind spot in Lech's approach, or perhaps just it wasn't a narrative he was exploring. It's great just to open up that whole concept to other eyes because you can't, in that short amount of time (even if you do use up all of your words as Lech and Sarah and I have), you're just not going to get everything. You've got your own path that you're treading.

SARAH: And we're not unfamiliar when you publish... The exception isn't hearing back from readers, the exception is having a right of reply. We mostly have to tolerate definite legitimate criticism which improves our endeavours, and equally many criticisms that are ideologically driven and factually lacking. We just have to suck that up 99 per cent of the time, because it doesn't behoove the position to get into a shit slinging match with readers that just don't like your work. That's part of the job. You develop a scab or a bruise or techniques of taking it on and forgetting or what have you. So to have that dialogue format is really rare and, I think, precious.

Because like Jess said, when you write about life, it is in ineluctably partial and selective. And we have our own focus areas for our own reasons and to be able to speak and disagree in a respectful environment – or, if it's not respectful, at least in an environment where people are equally heard. I mean, that is really a beautiful thing… So I'm telling myself this now and I'm going to play it back when the bile is rising, I'm sure, in three month’s time.

JESS: Oh, what you have to look forward to, Sarah.

ASTRID: Sarah and Jess, I would like to thank you both for speaking to me, but I would also like to say as an avid fan of the Quarterly Essay series, with all its ups and downs, I do think that you have both written classics. Jess, your work on me too, Sarah, your work on mental ill health are exceptional.

My favourite ever Quarterly Essay was Karen Hitchcock's from 2015, I believe, Dear Life: On Caring for the Elderly. And I cried the first time I read that, and she identified everything that went wrong with the aged care system through the pandemic, and we all found out the hard way, the brutal way. That's how important I think Quarterly Essays are – they give us the understanding of what we should have about what matters.

Thank you so very much and may everybody start to read the Quarterly Essays .

JESS: Thank you, Astrid. Thank you, Sarah.

SARAH: Thanks.

OTHER RECENT INTERVIEWS

James Bradley on the colonisation of the oceans

Amanda Lohrey on investigating meaning via fiction

Nam Le on 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem

Program: Conversations

A portrait of Peter Dutton

• X (formerly Twitter)

Lech Blaine has written a Quarterly Essay on Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who remains something of an enigma to many Australians.

Since becoming leader, Peter Dutton has been determined to defeat the Albanese government, not by winning back the heartland metropolitan seats they lost in 2022, but by tearing off the outer suburban and regional electorates that have traditionally voted Labor.

Lech traces the rise of Peter Dutton from outer suburban schoolkid, to Queensland police officer, to a new kind of Liberal leader.

Further information 

Lech's Quarterly Essay is published by Black Inc

• Richard Fidler, Presenter
• Carmel Rooney, Executive Producer

Discover more podcasts

Download the ABC listen app to hear more of your favourite podcasts

Leadership agility in the context of organisational agility: a systematic literature review

• Published: 17 April 2024

Cite this article

• Latika Tandon   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9937-072X 1 ,
• Tithi Bhatnagar   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8469-7658 1 , 2 &
• Tanushree Sharma   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-7727-0258 3  

34 Accesses

Explore all metrics

Organisations across the globe are looking to become agile and are seeking leaders to guide their transformation to agility. This paper conducts a systematic literature review across eighty-six papers spanning over 25 years (1999–2023), to develop an overview of how leadership agility is conceptualized in the context of organisational agility in the extant literature. This systematic review was conducted using the PRISMA framework. The databases searched for the review were: EBSCO, Emerald Insight, JStor, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, and Scopus. The data thus collected was organised and integrated using reflective thematic synthesis. Literature suggests that leadership agility is one of the key dimensions to foster organisational agility, though challenging in practice and difficult to implement. Based on the analysis of extant literature, this paper identifies four emergent themes of leadership agility: Leadership Agility Mindsets; Leadership Agility Competencies; Leadership Agility Styles; and Leadership Organisational Agility Functions . This study has conceptualized a framework of leadership agility in the context of organisational agility, anchored in the interplay of the emergent themes and their categories, contributing to leadership agility research, and promoting its adoption by the practitioners.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price includes VAT (Russian Federation)

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Rent this article via DeepDyve

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

A critical analysis of Elon Musk’s leadership in Tesla motors

Authoritarian leadership styles and performance: a systematic literature review and research agenda

Leadership in healthcare education

Data availability.

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.

Adhiatma A, Fachrunnisa O, Lukman N, Majid MNA (2023) Comparative study on workforce transformation strategy and SME policies in Indonesia and Malaysia. Eng Manage Prod Ser 15(4):1–11. https://doi.org/10.2478/emj-2023-0024

Article   Google Scholar  

Ahmed J, Mrugalska B, Akkaya B (2022) Agile management and VUCA 2.0 (VUCA-RR) during industry 4.0. In: Akkaya B, Guah MW, Jermsittiparsert K, Bulinska-Stangrecka H, Kaya Y (eds) Agile management and VUCA-RR: opportunities and threats in industry 4.0 towards society 5.0. Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp 13–26. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-325-320220002

Chapter   Google Scholar  

Akkaya B, Tabak A (2020) The link between organizational agility and leadership: a research in science parks. Acad Strateg Manag J 19:1–17

Google Scholar  

Akkaya B, Waritay-Guah M, Jermsittiparsert K, Bulinska-Stangrecka H, Kaya-Koçyiğit Y (2022) Agile management and VUCA-RR opportunities and threats in industry 4.0 towards society 5.0. Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley

Book   Google Scholar  

Akkaya B, Üstgörül S (2020) Leadership styles and female managers in perspective of agile leadership. Agile Bus Leadersh Methods Ind 4:121–137. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-380-920201008

Akkaya B, Sever E (2022) Agile leadership and organization performance in the perspective of VUCA. In: Post-pandemic talent management models in knowledge organizations. IGI Global

Aldianto L, Anggadwita G, Permatasari A, Mirzanti IR, Williamson IO (2021) Toward a business resilience framework for startups. Sustainability (switzerland) 13(6):1–19. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13063132

Appelbaum SH, Calla R, Desautels D, Hasan L (2017a) The challenges of organizational agility (part 1). Ind Commer Train 49(1):6–14. https://doi.org/10.1108/ICT-05-2016-0027

Appelbaum SH, Calla R, Desautels D, Hasan LN (2017b) The challenges of organizational agility: part 2. Ind Commer Train 49(2):69–74. https://doi.org/10.1108/ICT-05-2016-0028

As Global Growth Slows, Developing Economies Face Risk of ‘Hard Landing.’ (2022) The World Bank

Asseraf Y, Gnizy I (2022) Translating strategy into action: the importance of an agile mindset and agile slack in international business. Int Bus Rev 31(6):102036. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2022.102036

Attar M, Abdul-Kareem A (2020) The role of agile leadership in organisational agility. In: Akkaya B (ed) Agile business leadership methods for industry 40. Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp 171–191. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-380-920201011

Avery CM (2004) The mindset of an agile leader. Cut IT J 17(6):22–27

Balázs V, Éva S (2023) Unlocking the key dimensions of organizational agility: a systematic literature review on leadership, structural and cultural antecedents. Soc Econ 45. https://doi.org/10.1556/204.2023.00023

Benchea L, Ilie AG (2023) Preparing for a new world of work: leadership styles reconfigured in the digital age. Eur J Interdiscip Stud 15(1):135–143. https://doi.org/10.24818/ejis.2023.10

Booth A, Sutton A, Papaioannou D (2016) Systematic approaches to a successful literature review, 2nd edn. Sage, Thousand Oaks

Brandt EN, Kjellström S, Andersson A-C (2019) Transformational change by a post-conventional leader. Leadersh Org Dev J 40(4):457–471. https://doi.org/10.1108/LODJ-07-2018-0273

Buttigieg SC, Cassia MV, Cassar V (2023) The relationship between transformational leadership, leadership agility, work engagement and adaptive performance: a theoretically informed empirical study. In: Chambers N (ed) Research handbook on leadership in healthcare. Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, pp 235–251

Chakraborty T, Awan TM, Natarajan A, Kamran M (eds) (2023) Agile leadership for industry 4.0: an indispensable approach for the digital era, 1 edn. AAP/Apple Academic Press

Chatwani N (2019) Agility revisited. In: Chatwani N (ed) Organisational agility. Springer International Publishing, Berlin, pp 1–21

De Smet A, Lurie M, St George A (2018) Leading agile transformation: The new capabilities leaders need to build 21st-century organizations. Mckinsey.com, October 2018.

Denning S (2016) Agile’s ten implementation challenges. Strategy Leadersh 44(5):15–20. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-08-2016-0065

Denning S (2018a) Succeeding in an increasingly Agile world. Strategy Leadersh 46(3):3–9. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-03-2018-0021

Denning S (2018b) The role of the C-suite in Agile transformation: the case of Amazon. Strategy Leadersh 46(6):14–21. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-10-2018-0094

Denning S (2019a) Lessons learned from mapping successful and unsuccessful Agile transformation journeys. Strategy Leadersh 47(4):3–11. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-04-2019-0052

Denning S (2019b) The ten stages of the Agile transformation journey. Strategy Leadersh 47(1):3–10. https://doi.org/10.1108/SL-11-2018-0109

Doz Y, Kosonen M (2008) The dynamics of strategic agility: Nokia’s rollercoaster experience. Calif Manage Rev 50(3):95–118. https://doi.org/10.2307/41166447

Dulay S (ed) (2023) Empowering educational leaders: How to thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Peter Lang, Lausanne

Eilers K, Peters C, Leimeister JM (2022) Why the agile mindset matters. Technol Forecast Soc Chang 179:121650. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2022.121650

Esamah A, Aujirapongpan S, Rakangthong NK, Imjai N (2023) Agile leadership and digital transformation in savings cooperative limited: impact on sustainable performance amidst COVID-19. J Hum Earth Future 4(1):36–53. https://doi.org/10.28991/HEF-2023-04-01-04

Fachrunnisa O, Adhiatma A, Lukman N, Ab-Majid MN (2020) Towards SMEs’ digital transformation: the role of agile leadership and strategic flexibility. J Small Bus Strategy 30:65–85

Felipe CM, Roldán JL, Leal-Rodríguez AL (2016) An explanatory and predictive model for organizational agility. J Bus Res 69(10):4624–4631. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.04.014

Fernandes V, Wong W, Noonan M (2023) Developing adaptability and agility in leadership amidst the COVID-19 crisis: experiences of early-career school principals. Int J Educ Manag 37(2):483–506. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEM-02-2022-0076

Garton E, Noble A (2017) How to make agile work for the C-Suite. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2017/07/how-to-make-agile-work-for-the-c-suite

Govuzela S, Mafini C (2019) Organisational agility, business best practices and the performance of small to medium enterprises in South Africa. S Afr J Bus Manag 50(1):1–13. https://doi.org/10.4102/sajbm.v50i1.1417

Gren L, Ralph P (2022) What makes effective leadership in agile software development teams? In: Proceedings of the 44th international conference on software engineering, pp. 2402–2414. https://doi.org/10.1145/3510003.3510100

Gren L, Lindman M, Stray V, Hoda R, Paasivaara M, Kruchten P (2020) Agile processes in software engineering and extreme programming. 21st International Conference on Agile Software Development XP 2020 Copenhagen Denmark June 8–12, 2020 Proceedings What an Agile Leader Does: The Group Dynamics Perspective. Springer, Cham, pp 178–194. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49392-9

Grześ B (2023) Managing an agile organization – key determinants of orgnizational agility. Scientific Papers of Silesian University of Technology Organization and Management Series. 2023(172). https://doi.org/10.29119/1641-3466.2023.172.17

Hartney E, Melis E, Taylor D, Dickson G, Tholl B, Grimes K, Chan M-K, Van Aerde J, Horsley T (2022) Leading through the first wave of COVID: a Canadian action research study. Leadersh Health Serv 35(1):30–45. https://doi.org/10.1108/LHS-05-2021-0042

Hill L (2020) Being the agile boss. MIT SMR, Fall (2020)

Hofstede G, Hofstede GJ, Minkov M (2005) Cultures and organizations: software of the mind. Choice Rev 42(10):42–5937. https://doi.org/10.5860/CHOICE.42-5937

Holbeche L (2018) Organisational effectiveness and agility. J Organ Eff People Perform 5(4):302–313. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOEPP-07-2018-0044

Holbeche L (2019) Designing sustainably agile and resilient organizations. Syst Res Behav Sci 36(5):668–677. https://doi.org/10.1002/sres.2624

Horney N, Pasmore B, O’Shea T (2010) Leadership agility: a business imperative for a VUCA world. People Strategy 33(4):34

Howieson B, Grant K (2022) Wicked leadership development for wicked problems. In: Holland P, Bartram T, Garavan T, Grant K (eds) The emerald handbook of work, workplaces and disruptive issues in HRM. Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp 303–316. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80071-779-420221030

Jansen JJP, Vera D, Crossan M (2009) Strategic leadership for exploration and exploitation: the moderating role of environmental dynamism. Leadersh Q 20(1):5–18. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2008.11.008

Joiner B (2009) Creating a culture of agile leaders: a developmental approach. People Strategy 32(4):28–35

Joiner B (2012) How to build an agile leader. Chief Learn off 11(8):48–51

Joiner B, Josephs S (2007) Developing agile leaders. Ind Commer Train 39(1):35–42. https://doi.org/10.1108/00197850710721381

Jones S, Cass D (2022) Agile leadership: eight steps to becoming an agile team leader. Eff Exec 25(1):7–12

Kaya Y (2023) Agile leadership from the perspective of dynamic capabilities and creating value. Sustainability 15(21):15253. https://doi.org/10.3390/su152115253

Keleş HN (2023) Agile leadership in schools. In: Empowering educational leaders: How to thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world. Peter Lang AG

Konrad-Maerk M, Gfrerer A, Hutter K (2022) From transformational to agile leadership: what future skills it takes to act as agile leaders. Acad Manag Proc 2022(1):12343. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMBPP.2022.12343abstract

Kumar S, Ray S (2023) Moving towards agile leadership to help organizations succeed. IUP J Soft Skills 17(1):2023. ProQuest

Lang D, Rumsey C (2018) Business disruption is here to stay: What should leaders do? Qual Access Success 19(S3):35–40

Leslie J (2015) The leadership gap: what you need, and still don’t have, when it comes to leadership talent. Cent Creative Leadersh. https://doi.org/10.35613/ccl.2015.1014 (2015).

Liberati A, Altman DG, Tetzlaff J, Mulrow C, Gotzsche PC, Ioannidis JPA, Clarke M, Devereaux PJ, Kleijnen J, Moher D (2009) The PRISMA statement for reporting systematic reviews and meta-analyses of studies that evaluate healthcare interventions: explanation and elaboration. BMJ 339(1):b2700. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.b2700

Luthia M (2023) Agile Leadership for Industry 4.0. An Indispensable Approach for the Digital Era. Apple Academic Press, New York

MacLean D, MacIntosh R, Seidl D (2015) Rethinking dynamic capabilities from a creative action perspective. Strateg Organ 13(4):340–352. https://doi.org/10.1177/1476127015593274

McKenzie J, Aitken P (2012) Learning to lead the knowledgeable organization: developing leadership agility. Strateg HR Rev 11(6):329–334. https://doi.org/10.1108/14754391211264794

McPherson B (2016) Agile, adaptive leaders. Hum Resour Manag Int Dig 24(2):1–3. https://doi.org/10.1108/HRMID-11-2015-0171

Menon S, Suresh M (2021) Factors influencing organizational agility in higher education. Benchmark Int J 28(1):307–332. https://doi.org/10.1108/BIJ-04-2020-0151

Meyer R, Meijers R (2017) Leadership Agility: Developing Your Repertoire of Leadership Styles, 1st edn. Routledge, London

Modi S, Strode D (2020) Leadership in agile software development: a systematic literature review. In: ACIS 2020 proceedings. 55. https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2020/55

Morton J, Stacey P, Mohn M (2018) Building and maintaining strategic agility: an agenda and framework for executive IT leaders. Calif Manage Rev 61(1):94–113. https://doi.org/10.1177/0008125618790245

Muafi M, Diamastuti E, Pambudi A (2020) Service innovation strategic consensus: a lesson from the Islamic banking industry in Indonesia. J Asian Finance Econ Bus 7(11):401–411. https://doi.org/10.13106/JAFEB.2020.VOL7.NO11.401

Muafi M, Uyun Q (2019) Leadership agility, the influence on the organizational learning and organizational innovation and how to reduce imitation orientation. Int J Qual Res 13(2):467–484. https://doi.org/10.24874/IJQR13.02-14

Mukherjee T (2023) The power of empathy: rethinking leadership agility during transition. In: Agile leadership for industry 4.0. An indispensable approach for the digital era , 1st edn. Apple Academic Press

Naslund D, Kale R (2020) Is agile the latest management fad? A review of success factors of agile transformations. Int J Qual Serv Sci 12(4):489–504. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJQSS-12-2019-0142

Oliveira SRM, Saraiva MA (2023) Leader skills interpreted in the lens of education 4.0. Procedia Comput Sci 217:1296–1304. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2022.12.327

Orski K (2017) What’s your agility ability? Nurs Manage 48(4):44–51. https://doi.org/10.1097/01.NUMA.0000511922.75269.6a

O’Brien E, Robertson P (2009) Future leadership competencies: from foresight to current practice. J Eur Ind Train 33(4):371–380. https://doi.org/10.1108/03090590910959317

O’Reilly CA, Tushman ML (2008) Ambidexterity as a dynamic capability: resolving the innovator’s dilemma. Res Organ Behavior 28:185–206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2008.06.002

Page MJ, Moher D, Bossuyt PM, Boutron I, Hoffmann TC, Mulrow CD, Shamseer L, Tetzlaff JM, Akl EA, Brennan SE, Chou R, Glanville J, Grimshaw JM, Hróbjartsson A, Lalu MM, Li T, Loder EW, Mayo-Wilson E, McDonald S et al (2021) PRISMA 2020 explanation and elaboration: Updated guidance and exemplars for reporting systematic reviews. BMJ 372:160. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.n160

Paul J, Criado AR (2020) The art of writing literature review: What do we know and what do we need to know? Int Bus Rev 29(4):101717. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ibusrev.2020.101717

Pesut DJ, Thompson SA (2018) Nursing leadership in academic nursing: The wisdom of development and the development of wisdom. J Prof Nurs 34(2):122–127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.profnurs.2017.11.004

Piwowar-Sulej K, Sołtysik M, Różycka-Antkowiak JŁ (2022) Implementation of management 3.0: its consistency and conditional factors. J Organ Change Manage 35(3):541–557. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-07-2021-0203

Popay J, Roberts H, Sowden A, Petticrew M, Arai L, Rodgers M, Britten N, Roen K, Duffy S (2006) Guidance on the conduct of narrative synthesis in systematic reviews: a product from the ESRC Methods Programme. Lanc Univ https://doi.org/10.13140/2.1.1018.4643

Psychogios A (2022) Re-conceptualising total quality leadership: a framework development and future research agenda. TQM J. https://doi.org/10.1108/TQM-01-2022-0030

Rigby D, Elk S, Steve B (2020) The agile C-suite a new approach to leadership for the team at the top. Harv Bus Rev

Roux M, Härtel CEJ (2018) The cognitive, emotional, and behavioral qualities required for leadership assessment and development in the new world of work. In: Petitta L, Härtel CEJ, Ashkanasy NM, Zerbe WJ (eds) Research on emotion in organizations, vol 14, pp 59–69. Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1746-979120180000014010

Rožman M, Oreški D, Tominc P (2023a) A multidimensional model of the new work environment in the digital age to increase a company’s performance and competitiveness. IEEE Access 11:26136–26151. https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2023.3257104

Rožman M, Tominc P, Štrukelj T (2023b) Competitiveness through development of strategic talent management and agile management ecosystems. Glob J Flex Syst Manage 24(3):373–393. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40171-023-00344-1

Şahin S, Alp F (2020) Agile leadership model in health care: Organizational and individual antecedents and outcomes. In: Akkaya B (ed) Agile business leadership methods for industry 4.0. Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp 47–68

Sampson CJ (2023) How agile leadership can sustain innovation in healthcare. Front Health Serv Manage 40(2):1–3. https://doi.org/10.1097/HAP.0000000000000186

Saputra N (2023) Digital quotient as mediator in the link of leadership agility to employee engagement of digital generation. In: 2023 8th International conference on business and industrial research (ICBIR), pp 706–710. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICBIR57571.2023.10147472

Sharifi H, Zhang Z (1999) Methodology for achieving agility in manufacturing organisations: an introduction. Int J Prod Econ 62(1):7–22. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0925-5273(98)00217-5

Sheffield R, Jensen KR, Kaudela-Baum S (2023) Inspiring and enabling innovation leadership: key findings and future directions. In: K. R. Jensen, S. Kaudela-Baum, R. Sheffield (eds) Innovation leadership in practice: how leaders turn ideas into value in a changing world. Emerald Publishing Limited, pp 367–381. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-396-120231019

Silva-Martinez J (2023) Conceptualization of agile leadership characteristics and outcomes from NASA agile teams as a path to the development of an agile leadership theory. J Creat Value, 23949643231202894. https://doi.org/10.1177/23949643231202894

Spiegler SV, Heinecke C, Wagner S (2021) An empirical study on changing leadership in agile teams. Abstr Empirical Softw Eng 26(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-021-09949-5

Teece D, Peteraf M, Leih S (2016) Dynamic capabilities and organizational agility: Risk, uncertainty, and strategy in the innovation economy. Calif Manage Rev 58(4):13–35. https://doi.org/10.1525/cmr.2016.58.4.13

The Center for Creative Leadership (2015) What you need, and don’t have, when it comes to leadership talent. Center for Creative Leadership

The World Bank (2022) As global growth slows, developing economies face risk of ‘Hard Landing’. The World Bank . The World Bank

Theobald S, Prenner N, Krieg A, Schneider K (2020) Agile leadership and agile management on organizational level—a systematic literature review. In: Lecture notes in computer science (including subseries lecture notes in artificial intelligence and lecture notes in bioinformatics), 12562 LNCS, pp 20–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-64148-1_2

Turan HY, Cinnioğlu H (2022) Agile leadership and employee performance in VUCA world. In: Akkaya B, Guah MW, Jermsittiparsert K, Bulinska-Stangrecka H, Kaya Y (eds) Agile management and VUCA-RR: opportunities and threats in industry 4.0 towards society 5.0. Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp 27–38

Ulrich D, Yeung A (2019) Agility: the new response to dynamic change. Strateg HR Rev 18(4):161–167. https://doi.org/10.1108/SHR-04-2019-0032

Vaszkun B, Sziráki É (2023) Unlocking the key dimensions of organizational agility: a systematic literature review on leadership, structural and cultural antecedents. Soc Econ 45(4):393–410. https://doi.org/10.1556/204.2023.00023

Walter A-T (2021) Organizational agility: ill-defined and somewhat confusing? A systematic literature review and conceptualization. Manage Rev Q 71(2):343–391. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-020-00186-6

Warner KSR, Wäger M (2019) Building dynamic capabilities for digital transformation: an ongoing process of strategic renewal. Long Range Plan 52(3):326–349. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2018.12.001

Weiss L, Vergin L, Kanbach DK (2023) How agile leaders promote continuous innovation: an explorative framework. In: K. R. Jensen, S. Kaudela-Baum, R. Sheffield (eds) Innovation leadership in practice: How leaders turn ideas into value in a changing world. Emerald Publishing Limited, Bingley, pp 223–242. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-83753-396-120231012

Zitkiene R, Deksnys M (2018) Organizational agility conceptual model. Monten J Econ 14(2):115–129. https://doi.org/10.14254/1800-5845/2018.14-2.7

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge the Research Ethics and Review Board (RERB) at O.P. Jindal Global University for their review and approval on our research study.

The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Jindal Institute of Behavioural Sciences, O.P. Jindal Global University, Haryana, India

Latika Tandon & Tithi Bhatnagar

National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS), Bangalore, India

Tithi Bhatnagar

Jindal Global Business School, and Executive Director-Centre for Learning and Innovative Pedagogy (CLIP), O.P. Jindal Global University, Haryana, India

Tanushree Sharma

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by first author. The first draft of the manuscript was written by first author and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Latika Tandon .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors have no competing interests to declare that are relevant to the content of this article.

Additional information

Publisher's note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

See the Table  6 , 7 and 8 .

Rights and permissions

Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Tandon, L., Bhatnagar, T. & Sharma, T. Leadership agility in the context of organisational agility: a systematic literature review. Manag Rev Q (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-024-00422-3

Download citation

Received : 15 June 2022

Accepted : 12 March 2024

Published : 17 April 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-024-00422-3

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Leadership agility
• Agile leaders
• Agile leadership
• Organisational agility
• Leadership agility mindset
• Leadership agility competencies
• Leadership agility functions

JEL Classification

• Find a journal
• Publish with us
• Track your research

• Study at Cambridge
• About the University
• Research at Cambridge

Harrison Whitaker awarded the Cambridge Quarterly’s Richard D. Gooder Essay Prize

• 23 Apr 2024

Many congratulations to Harrison Whitaker, PhD student at Cambridge Film & Screen, who has been awarded the Cambridge Quarterly ‘s annual Richard D. Gooder Essay Prize.

The award is given to essays that explore the relationships between diverse artistic forms and are accessible to a wide audience.

Harrison’s essay, How Hollywood Watched Television , has been published . His Cambridge profile is here .

Support Film & Screen - Make a Donation

Cambridge Film & Screen, Raised Faculty Building, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA

• Email: [email protected]
• Tel: +44 (0)1223 335057
• Accessibility
• Freedom of information
• Statement on modern slavery
• Privacy and cookies policy

© 2024 Cambridge Film & Screen. All Rights Reserved.

Web Design by Chameleon Studios

• MPhil Overview
• MPhil Funding
• MPhil Michaelmas Term – Core Course
• MPhil Lent Term – Modules
• MPhil Easter Term – Thesis (MPhil By Thesis)
• MPhil Easter Term – Dissertation
• MPhil Guidelines
• MPhil Alumni Profiles
• PhD Overview
• PhD Funding
• Current PhD Students
• Postdoctoral Affiliation

Cambridge Film & Screen

Email: [email protected] Tel: +44 (0)1223 335057