Abstract

Agile software development teams require a high degree of team empowerment, but the necessity of these teams to make autonomous decisions and self-organize is at odds with traditional command-and-control management. As more and more organizations adopt agile methods at a large scale, managers can be either a burden or a facilitator in the endeavor to achieve agility. Prior research has extensively studied internal processes of agile teams, but our understanding of the role of team-external managers is limited. In this research, we conducted a case study in five teams in a large organization currently undergoing an agile transformation. We developed a theoretical model of team-external management and its effects on team empowerment. We provide both recommendations for practitioners and a set of hypotheses for empirical testing in future research.

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