A meta-analysis on the effects of IT capability toward agility and performance: New directions for information systems research

Information technology (IT) capability is an organizational capability that enables organizations to acquire, deploy, combine, and reconfigure IT resources. As such, it is often investigated in conjunction with organizational agility—an organization’s ability to sense and respond to changes—and organizational performance. Studies on IT capability distinguish between reactive and proactive IT capability and identify varying effects in relation to agility and performance. While reactive IT capability supports and enhances work processes, proactive IT capability supports and enhances business strategies. In the light of the mixed results of prior research, we conduct a meta-analytical investigation into the varying effects that reactive and proactive IT capability have on organizational agility and organizational performance. We identified 6.436 studies from multiple sources that we systematically reduced to include 72 empirical studies in our analysis. Contrary to previous results and widely held opinion, our meta-analysis neither finds support for differences in effect size between reactive (r+ = 0.39, k = 34, 95% Confidence Interval (CI) [0.34, 0.44]) and proactive IT capability (r+ = 0.38, k = 21, 95% CI [0.31, 0.45]) toward agility (z = 0.68, p = 0.25), nor from reactive IT capability (r+ = 0.31, k = 43, 95% CI [0.26, 0.37]) and proactive IT capability (r+ = 0.33, k = 25, 95% CI [0.27, 0.40]) toward performance (z = 1.11, p = 0.13). Given the importance of IT capability, we discuss possible explanations and propose four areas for future research: latency, sequence, configurational, and theoretical multiplicity of IT capability.