Lucas Vergin, Lysander Weiss, Dominik K. Kanbach, Thorben Sertler

• Today's business environments demand continuous innovation and adaption in established companies for long-term competitiveness. To ensure this, many leaders thrive for agility in their organizations. Currently, this concept is mostly regarded operationally as a project management approach. But the realization of the full strategic potential of agility requires a holistic, organization-wide approach. While one possibility to implement such 'organizational agility' lies in the use of suitable management control systems, no established framework exists to achieve this. To address this gap, the present study qualitatively analyses case companies with an agility enabling MCS to answer the question of how management control systems can be designed to enable and support agile capabilities on an organizational level. The proposed novel framework for management control systems includes five elements and their mutual interactions that help leaders to enable and support organizational agility for continuous innovation and adaption: Empowerment of employees, anchoring of flexibility, performance transparency, leadership support, and the cultural foundation of organizational agility.