Top management support and organizational agility: A systematic examination of the mediating roles of information technology capability and organizational learning
The proliferation of artificial intelligence (AI) across industrial sectors is reshaping how firms pursue competitive advantage, prompting senior executives to reconsider how strategic resources are committed and capabilities cultivated. Drawing on dynamic capability theory and the technology–organization–environment framework, this study advances a capability-building mechanism that organizes the antecedents of organizational agility (OA) across three structured stages, treating the framework as a systematic innovation process rather than a set of isolated variable relationships. Central to it, AI-enabled information technology capability (ITC) and organizational learning (OL) are conceptualized as two interdependent pathways through which top management support (TMS) is associated with agility outputs. Using structural equation modeling with bootstrap resampling (B = 5,000) on 382 Chinese manufacturing and high-tech firms surveyed through a three-wave time-lagged design, the results indicate that TMS relates to OA positively through both channels: the indirect effect via ITC is 0.187 and via OL is 0.135, together accounting for 69.7% of the total effect. Beyond parallel mediation, a significant sequential path links the two mediators (ITC → OL; serial effect = 0.073), consistent with a synergistic chain logic. A moderated mediation test shows that technological uncertainty conditions the ITC–agility association—about 1.87 times stronger under high than low uncertainty (index of moderated mediation = 0.091)—while complementary fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis identifies three equifinal configurations for high agility, each anchored by strong TMS. Because the design is observational, findings are interpreted as consistent with, rather than proof of, the hypothesized mechanisms. Theoretically, the study extends the contextualized application of dynamic capability theory to AI-permeated settings; practically, it offers executives a stage-specific, industry-differentiated model for AI-accelerated digital transformation.
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