Organizational agility promises responsiveness, learning, customer alignment, and decentralized action, yet its enactment may also intensify the behavioral demands placed on employees. Existing accounts often treat agile practices as either empowering resources or operational techniques, leaving insufficient explanation of how apparently autonomous work can become a mode of control. This original non-empirical process theory article proposes the Process Theory of Agility-Induced Exhaustion. The theory distinguishes agile practices from three proposed control translations: temporal compression, through which accelerated cycles constrain the time available for completion, interpretation, and recovery; responsibility expansion, through which obligations grow without equivalent authority, resources, or role clarification; and behavioral discipline, through which visible and repeated adaptation normalizes continuous self-correction. These mechanisms are proposed to increase self-regulatory work and, under unfavorable organizational conditions, produce behavioral exhaustion, defined as diminished capacity to sustain adaptation, coordination, self-monitoring, and role negotiation. The theory also identifies psychological safety, consequential participation, authority–responsibility alignment, organizational skills, usable resources, temporal slack, and recovery opportunities as potential moderators. Its propositions specify when agile practices may generate strain, when resource-generating pathways may prevail, and how reciprocal processes could reinforce or interrupt exhaustion. The model remains conceptually proposed rather than empirically validated. Testing requires longitudinal, multilevel, process-sensitive research that separates employee perceptions from organizational practices and distinguishes formal autonomy from substantive power. The contribution is a bounded explanation of how agility may operate simultaneously as organizational capability and behavioral control.
