Fostering Agile Mindsets in Management Education: A Systematic Literature Review of Agile Teaching Strategies and Their Implications for Educators

Management education has increasingly adopted agile frameworks such as Design Thinking and Scrum, yet a growing distinction separates doing agile – teaching in an agile manner, the visible enactment of practices – from being agile , the underlying agile mindset. Recent psychometric work has established the agile mindset as a valid construct predicting workplace performance and innovative work behaviour. This raises the question of whether current teaching designs actually engage the mindset dimensions underlying agility. Drawing on 69 peer-reviewed studies published between 2012 and 2024, this systematic literature review uses the four-dimensional agile mindset construct (Learning Spirit, Collaborative Exchange, Empowered Self-Guidance, Customer Co-Creation) as an analytical grid to map which mindset dimensions teaching designs address, and which they leave aside. Findings show a strong emphasis on Design Thinking, while iterative approaches such as Scrum remain underutilised. Collaborative Exchange dominates the coded mechanisms across studies, whereas Customer Co-Creation is comparatively neglected. Critically, although many studies report student outcomes, these rarely concern change in the agile mindset dimensions, and none employ a validated multi-dimensional measure of the construct. We therefore frame our synthesis as evidence about reported alignment and pedagogical mechanisms, not verified mindset change, and derive implications for curriculum design and faculty support.