Leading Agile Self-Organizing Teams : A Collective Learning Perspective
Behnaz Gholami, Armin Heinzl · 2013
Agile Software Development (ASD) puts a higher emphasis on people as well as social interactions, which require a higher degree of human communication and learning. Selforganizing ASD teams are considered to be the fundamental features of agility boosting and benefitting from learning. Hence, ASD changes the role of the project manager from a project controller to a team facilitator. Nevertheless, according to current research, selforganizing teams do not work in an entirely leaderless or free from management control. Therefore, this study attempts to understand the role of leaders of ASD teams and determines the areas in which leaders can influence collective learning as a group process phenomenon. Adopting the interpretive case study, the results unfold collective learning incidents and extend recent work on the influence of leaders on collective learning in ASD.