Tracing 25 years of employee agility research: the missing links and future directions

Over the past two decades, the growing turbulence of the VUCA era, accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and digital transformation, has compelled organizations to develop agility as a vital capability for survival and adaptation. However, while organizational agility has received considerable scholarly attention, research on employee agility as its micro-foundation remains limited and fragmented, leaving substantial gaps in understanding the individual-level factors that shape organizational adaptability. This study presents a comprehensive bibliometric review of research on employee agility over the past 25 years, aiming to map its intellectual, conceptual, and social structures, identify gaps in the existing literature, and outline future research directions. The analysis encompasses 319 publications indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, spanning the period from 2000 to 2025. Using Biblioshiny and VOSviewer, the study examines publication trends, citation networks, thematic structures, and emerging research frontiers. The results reveal a sharp increase in publications since 2020, driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and digital transformation pressures. Three main clusters dominate the field: (1) organisational responses to change and disruption, (2) HRM practices and individual-level mechanisms, and (3) collaboration, knowledge sharing, and digital platforms. Despite these developments, significant gaps remain, including the limited integration of leadership, weak linkage between employee agility and innovation, the divide between HR-driven and digital-driven agility, and the underrepresentation of studies in the public sector and Southeast Asia. By synthesising fragmented insights across two major databases, this study highlights employee agility as a micro-foundation of organisational agility and proposes future research directions focusing on leadership, digital competence, innovation, psychological factors, and public sector contexts. These contributions position employee agility as not only a short-term adaptive capability but also a strategic enabler of innovation and sustainability in dynamic environments.