Understanding Leadership in Agile Software Development Teams: Who and How?

Weichbrodt, J., Kropp, M., Biddle, R., Gregory, P. , Anslow, C., Buhler, U. M., Mateescu, M. and Meier, A. (2022) Understanding Leadership in Agile Software Development Teams: Who and How? In: 23rd International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP 2022), Copenhagen, Denmark, 13–17 June 2022, pp. 99-113. ISBN 9783031081682 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-08169-9_7)

Abstract

The principles in the Agile Manifesto, the Scrum Guide and most other approaches to agile software development emphasize self-organizing teams, but rarely address issues of leadership. In this paper we report on a study of the nature of different aspects of leadership in agile teams. We used an established model of leadership, distinguishing transactional and transformational styles, and asked IT professionals a set of questions about the leadership they experience, both from direct supervisors (hierarchical leadership) and from the team itself (shared leadership). We determined correlation measures of these four types of leadership with the extent of agility in the whole organization. Our results show that agility is indeed related to the transformational style, but that the transactional style also plays a part, especially as shared leadership. Furthermore, even in highly agile software development, leadership by direct supervisors still plays an important role. We propose that, as software development becomes more agile, the transactional aspects of leadership may shift away from the leadership dyad between supervisor and employee into the agile team, while transformational leadership is important for both the team and supervisors. We discuss our results in light of applications for both research and practice.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Keywords: Leadership, agile software development, shared leadership, transactional leadership, transformational leadership.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Gregory, Dr Peggy
• Authors: Weichbrodt, J., Kropp, M., Biddle, R., Gregory, P., Anslow, C., Buhler, U. M., Mateescu, M., and Meier, A.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• ISBN: 9783031081682
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2022 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Agile Software Development, XP 2022, Copenhagen, Denmark, June 13–17, 2022, LNBIP 445:99-113
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License