How Agile Software Development Teams are Led and Lead Themselves – A Literature Review on the Duality of Agile Leadership

Abstract

Agile software development (ASD) methods are widely applied today as organizations expect to gain flexibility and foster innovation. Since one of the basic problem-solving mechanisms of ASD is a cross-functional, self-organizing, and empowered team at its core, the shift from traditional to ASD approaches requires fundamental changes to management and governance processes and structures. Especially among practitioners, the term “agile leadership” is popular to describe the new demands for formal and informal leaders in an agile environment. In research, the concept is increasingly prevalent and connected to a variety of established leadership theories, but it is not yet consistently conceptualized. This study seeks to integrate existing definitions into a comprehensive model that comprises both a team-internal and team-external perspective of agile leadership. Therefore, a systematic literature review is performed to gather and assess prior literature on how agile leadership materializes in practice. A first iteration of the concept is developed and future research directions are summarized.