Highly Effective Agile Team Cultures
Carla Bastiaansen is an external Ph.D. candidate of the department of Change Management & Organization Behaviour. Her (co) promotors are Prof. dr. Celeste P.M Wilderom and dr. Desirée H. van Dun from the Faculty of Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences. Outside of her Ph.D studies, Ms. Bastiaansen works as Project Director, Program Manager and Management Consultant in technology consulting and holds a supervisory position.
In a world where change is the only constant, organizations are challenged to become agile, customer-focussed, and responsive. This Ph.D. dissertation studied the elements of Highly Effective Agile Team (HEAT) cultures, necessary to improve the performance of agile organizations. The dissertation offers an academically sound and simultaneously practical and motivating perspective on the development of an agile culture and related generic and agile work values in a cross-cultural context.
To really embrace agile, it is important that work values are shared, gain meaning together, and are valued in the same way by executive board members, leaders, agile teams, and agile coaches. That is how the foundation is laid to foster a culture in which teams can be effective. Study 1 in the thesis is a mixed-method study and brings a theoretical contribution to the existing scientific discourse based on a real-world example. The literature study identified generic work values and 11 additional agile values. Interviews and Delphi meetings were held with agile experts, followed by surveys and group interviews among agile workers in a private global Indian digital service and consulting firm, with offices in the United Kingdom and offshore in India. This showed how much importance the agile IT personnel attach to those values and how much they differ among cross-cultural IT workers. The conditions to predict an effective team were examined in Study 2: A systematic literature study. The available theory-based, empirical agile-team studies were identified. Based on this, the predictors of HEATs were synthesized and categorized into affective, behavioural, and cognitive team dynamics, as well as a fourth category: design enabling predictors. This HEAT model was then validated and refined by applying a mixed-method approach in Study 3, including surveys, semi-structured interviews with agile scholars, senior practitioners, and agile teams of a semi-public organization in the Netherlands.
This doctoral dissertation thus constitutes a valuable resource for anyone who would like to contribute to an inspiring and agile workplace designed for optimal performance.
