Understanding Work Practices of Autonomous Agile Teams: A Social-psychological Review

TL;DR

This paper explores how social psychology theories, especially social identity and group socialization, can enhance understanding of autonomous agile teams, emphasizing the need for empirical research to support agile practices.

Contribution

It identifies relevant social-psychological theories applicable to autonomous agile teams and highlights the gap in empirical evidence within this context.

Findings

Social identity theory relates to team cohesion.

Group socialization theory explains team formation.

Literature supports psychological basis for agile practices.

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to suggest additional aspects of social psychology that could help when making sense of autonomous agile teams. To make use of well-tested theories in social psychology and instead see how they replicated and differ in the autonomous agile team context would avoid reinventing the wheel. This was done, as an initial step, through looking at some very common agile practices and relate them to existing findings in social-psychological research. The two theories found that I argue could be more applied to the software engineering context are social identity theory and group socialization theory. The results show that literature provides social-psychological reasons for the popularity of some agile practices, but that scientific studies are needed to gather empirical evidence on these under-researched topics. Understanding deeper psychological theories could provide a better understanding of the psychological processes when building autonomous agile team, which could then lead to better predictability and intervention in relation to human factors.