Teams

are at the heart of the value chain in the technology industry of the 21st century.

Famously, the notion that workers forming groups might increase overall productivity starts with Elton Mayo’s (1945) interpretation of the Hawthorne Studies, a set of sociotechnical experiments in factory workspaces with the goal of increasing productivity by changing the environment of the workplace. [⇒ Hawthorne Experiment]

Mayo reached two important conclusions: First, forming teams seems to improve how workers perceive pressure in their workplace and secondly, that to reap the benefits of teams, there needs to be “free participation of such teams in the task and purpose of the organization as it directly affects them in their daily round” (1945, 73).

Also in the 1940s, Kurt Lewin ran experiments on increasing the long-term effectiveness of professional training (cf. Crosby 2021). His group found that the trainings themselves worked better when participants formed teams, but that this alone did not lead to improvements in the long-term effects of the trainings:

It was only when teams that took the training together also went on to apply their knowledge together in the same constellation that long-term improvements started to materialize.

Throughout the 20th century, teamwork has become a mainstay of organizing work in the production of physical goods (esp. in the automotive sector, cf. Fuxman 1999). Beyond immediate productivity gains, other positive effects have been made out as well. The division of labor and inventions such as the assembly line have excelled at delivering mass-produced goods at quality often superior to hand-made one-offs, while also drastically lowering prices. However, while assembly lines are excellent at creating masses of products with consistent quality, mass production falls short when it comes to quickly adapting products to ever-changing needs of customers who live in complex contexts (cf. Zhu et al. 2008).

In 2001, seventeen software engineers collaborated to create the Agile Manifesto (Agile Alliance 2015; Beck/Beedle et al. 2001). It defines the idea of re-integrating human needs in the software development process, and to stay open to changes necessitated by new learnings on the needs of users. The Agile Manifesto also highlights Collaboration (ibid.).

Based on the experience that software-driven products need engineers, designers, and product managers to complete their value cycles from initial research to market adoption, the nucleus of the technology industry was formed: The agile product team (cf. Scaled Agile 2021).

Two ideals have been related to the notion of the agile product team: empowerment and independence (the latter sometimes also referred to as Autonomy).

The ideal of the “empowered” team (Cagan/ Jones 2020) sees teams which are able to take their own decisions on the content and the mode of their work to the largest extent possible. This has been flanked by the DevOps movement, where product developers also run the operational IT infrastructure needed for the creation and use of their products (Forsgren et al. 2018).

The ideal of “independent” teams is about as little reliance on the work of others as possible, especially of others in the same organization (cf. Scaled Agile  2021). This ideal relates to the untangling of complex relations created in classical matrix organizations, where experts and their departments are often involved in numerous projects running concurrently, to the detriment of project progress and productivity.

Both ideals point to the need for agile teams to have freedom to operate, to exercise agility in the face of their own findings about their environment. At the same time, agile teams do usually work on a project, which could be a self-selected mission or an assignment from stakeholders.

Dirk Baecker (2017, 11) has observed this tension in the following form:

The focus here lies on creating and maintaining the Empty Space, the freedom to operate in agile ways of working.

I (Florian Grote) would argue that the notion of assignment can also include self-selected missions if they are observed as self-assignments coming from a team’s understanding of its environment. Baecker goes on to characterize agile product development as “a form of reproduction in a medium of its own disintegration, of fulfilling an assignment in the medium of an emptiness that needs to be regained constantly” (Baecker 2017, 19, transl. FG). Thus, agile teams create a boundary between themselves and an organization they belong to. Team members are still also members of the organization, but not all members of the organization are typically team members. This may be different for many small startups, where the product team is the company. In addition, the transparency enforced by agile ways of working means that teams tend to work in interaction situations, i. e., with the observation of mutual presence. Baecker (2005, 110) has proposed two forms to characterize these conditions:

[…]

Organizations accept this new setting of internal boundaries and the opaqueness created by agile teams in exchange for the promise of increased productivity. In an overview study, Srinivasan and Mukherjee (2018) appear to find a signal supporting this promise.

In this study, we are analyzing teams that follow the general ideals of being empowered, independent agile product teams. This is made easier for them as they are single-team organizations embedded in the context of a university and a learning concept designed to support their way of working. On the other hand, these teams have many inexperienced members who are not well-versed in decision-making processes, but have access to and make use of project and team consulting in all areas of specialty.

⇒ Team Forming

GROTE, Florian, 2023. Distinction Dynamics: A Form Analysis of Self-Descriptions in Agile Teams. Soziale Systeme. 25 June 2023. Vol. 28, no. 1, p. 130–162. DOI 10.1515/sosys-2023-0008. page doi