Interdependent Routines and Innovation Processes – An Ethnographic Study of Scrum Teams
Christian Alexander Mahringer, Katharina Dittrich, Birgit Elisabeth Renzl · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2019
Organizational routines are an important concept to understand how organizations coordinate their work. Most research on organizational routines seems to assume that a concise description of the outcomes that routines produce exists a priori. Work in organizations, however, is oftentimes characterized by high degrees of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. In such cases, the outcomes that routines produce are only partially defined in advance and constantly change their shape over time. Hence, this paper focuses on contexts, like innovation processes, in which routines produce outcomes that are largely unknown in the beginning, but are constantly in the process of becoming. We combine theory on epistemic objects and routines to understand how software development teams of a medium sized company deal with highly complex and ambiguous issues to be resolved. We present our ethnographic study of these teams working with the Scrum framework and show that performing multiple organizational routines orchestrates the unfolding of innovative processes.