Improving productivity with self-organised teams and agile leadership

Abstract

Purpose-Many organisations remain adverse to self-organised teams. The reasons are non-trivial and complex, but it is suspected that not willing to let go to direct control by senior management is at the root cause. There is a perceived security in following traditional, hierarchical chains of command under the guise of reducing risks and maintaining efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a research agenda that will empirically test in the field a range of widely held assumptions around leadership of self-organised teams. In total, 23 companies have agreed to participate in the proposed longitudinal research. Design/methodology/approach-An extensive literature review has identified extant theories, frameworks, and methodologies adopted by researchers to gain greater understanding of self-organised teams. This knowledge will be used as the basis for generating hypotheses for subsequent testing in the field. Findings-There is a considerable knowledge base established for self-organised teams. However, there is limited understanding of the benefits or detrimental effects of self-organised teams on organisational productivity and the appropriate style of leadership. This initial research has identified several hypotheses that will be used to develop questionnaires and instruments for information collection. Research limitations/implications-The tools and techniques presented in this article need to be adapted to the organisation's specificities as well as to the contextual situation. Practical implications-The work is of significant practical use. The research will be completed in a number of companies. There will be continuous input from operational and executive management. The findings from the work will be disseminated through various channels including workshops and conferences. Companies implementing and using self-organised teams will benefit from the knowledge generated. Social implications-Self-organised teams are used in a variety of settingscommercial businesses, not-for-profit, NGOs. The work will explore issues around behavioural networks and inter-intra-team relationships. Originality/value-There is much rhetoric around the adoption and uses of self-organised teams, yet there appears to be little understanding of the effect of leadership style of these teams and effect on productivity. This work will therefore contribute to the understanding of self-organised teams. While prior research has been conducted in the motivational and behavioural implications of self-organised teams, the knowledge is at best scant when leadership models for self-organised teams and operational factors are explored.

Attaining organisational agility through competitive intelligence: the roles of strategic flexibility and organisational innovation

“…Our findings suggest that strategic flexibility at the organizational level can be implemented at the level of individual employees, who have an agile mindset, working together in teams (Parker, Holesgrove & Pathak, 2015), as described by Katzenbach and Smith (2005). In this view, strategy alone can only produce conditions favorable to agility, not agility itself.…”

The Ability of Project Managers to Implement Industry 4.0-Related Projects

“…This requires a different leadership style within the project environment from the traditional controlling role [19]. As noted by Parker [20], the principles of servant-leadership benefit the building of self-organised teams as they empower followers -this is noted as a critical success factor [21]. Table 2 summarises from literature how Agile enablers and servant-leadership align to support the critical success factors required as listed in Table 1.…”

Earn Your Wings: A Novel Approach to Deployment Governance

“…The objective of this paper is therefore to contribute to the field, based on a research question proposed, during last year's workshop on scaling agile at XP 2018 [10]: "What is the right degree of team autonomy in different contexts (and how to measure it)?" 2 Literature Review Parker, Holesgrove, and Pathak [11] define a self-organized team "as a self-regulated, semi-autonomous small group of employees whose members determine, plan and manage their day-to-day activities and duties under reduced or no supervision." (p. 112) and the labels "autonomous teams" have been used as synonyms for "selforganizing teams," "self-managing teams" and "empowered teams" [10].…”

“…Literature abounds on numerous topics such as: leadership, roles, phases, performance, team dynamics, etc. More and more researchers reuse some of that literature to study software development teams using agile approaches, for example to relate autonomy to team performance [12], empowerment and outcomes in software development organizations [13], productivity of self-organized teams [11] and job satisfaction and/or motivation [14].…”