Emergences of new technology, shifts in consumer preferences and intense competition have all fundamentally disrupted the current business environment. While these disruptions can displace businesses, they can also provide opportunities to improve business performance through the adoption of strategic agility. Strategic agility enables businesses to innovate and adjust in a disruptive and turbulent environment (Reed in Journal of Strategy and Management 14:129–149, 2020 [1]. Despite this, there are limited studies on strategic agility in the disruptive environments of emerging markets (Adomako in International Business Review 31, 2022 [2]. Given the more disruptive nature of emerging market environmental conditions, strategic agility should have greater importance in emerging markets than in developed markets. Drawing from the literature on strategic agility and environmental strategy, this study constructs a research model with environmental turbulences as the antecedent variable to strategic agility. Environmental turbulence is used to capture the complexity and changes in the external environment in which businesses operate (Pavlou and Sawy in Information Systems Research 17:198–227, 2006 [3]. This study will investigate the three highly cited environmental turbulence dimensions, namely market turbulences, technological turbulences, and competitive intensity (Jaworski and Kohli in Journal of Marketing 57:53–70, 1993 [4], and three dimensions of strategic agility, that is market capitalising agility, partnering agility and operational agility (Lu and Ramamurthy in MIS Quarterly 35:931–954, 2011 [5]; Mikalef and Pateli in Journal of Business Research 70:1–16, 2017 [6]. To evaluate the research model, 529 SBUs in an emerging market were surveyed. We examined the relationships using structural equation modelling, and the results show that strategic agility improves business performance and enables businesses to cope with the disruptive environment, particularly in an emerging market setting. Our study, which is conducted in an emerging market demonstrates that strategic agility is an important capability that should be possessed by businesses operating in these markets to attain competitive advantage.