What Makes Effective Leadership in Agile Software Development Teams?
It addresses leadership challenges for agile software teams, but is incremental as it builds on existing management research with specific qualitative insights.
This study investigates how leadership functions in agile software development teams, finding that it is dynamically shared among members, fosters team belonging, and involves balancing organizational cultures, making it a team property rather than a role.
Effective leadership is one of the key drivers of business and project success, and one of the most active areas of management research. But how does leadership work in agile software development, which emphasizes self-management and self-organization and marginalizes traditional leadership roles? To find out, this study examines agile leadership from the perspective of thirteen professionals who identify as agile leaders, in different roles, at ten different software development companies of varying sizes. Data from semi-structured interviews reveals that leadership: (1) is dynamically shared among team members; (2) engenders a sense of belonging to the team; and (3) involves balancing competing organizational cultures (e.g. balancing the new agile culture with the old milestone-driven culture). In other words, agile leadership is a property of a team, not a role, and effectiveness depends on agile team members' identifying with the team, accepting responsibility, and being sensitive to cultural conflict.