Structured interviews were conducted with five experts working in different companies in the field of agile software development and software testing in order to inductively gain a better understanding of how shared leadership in self-organising teams is executed. The interviews were conducted in August 2013. A semi-structured interview technique was used with a defined questioning plan according to the identified shared leadership competence areas (Easterby-Smith et al., 2008b). During the interview, a natural conversation flow was followed, which led to a deviation from the original plan in some cases (Easterby-Smith et al., 2008b). The people interviewed had work experience in self-organising teams ranging from 7 months up to 6 years, and they used Scrum as the Agile methodology (Schwaber, 2008). Before the interviews took place, each interview partner was asked to complete the leaderful questionnaire by (Raelin, 2010). The leaderful questionnaire measures the leaderful readiness of a leader working in a self-organising team using Raelin’s leaderful concept (Raelin, 2003; Raelin, 2010; Raelin, 2011). According to Raelin’s concept, a person who has a leaderful score above 30 is a leader who shares leadership and power with others in the organisation. Each of the interview partners scored above 30 as depicted in Figure 13, their scores are depicted as a radar chart in Figure 14.
Figure 13: Raelin’s Leaderful Score (y-axis) for the Five Interview Partners
Figure 14: Raelin’s Leaderful Score of the Five Interview Partners in a Radar Chart
The results related to Raelin’s leaderful scores indicated that all the interview partners are experienced leaders who are familiar with the concept of shared leadership, since everyone scored above 30. Thus, they apply shared leadership in their respective teams. Therefore, they were suitable interview partners to give advice on shared leadership competencies. The roles that the interviewed partners held in a self-organising team were either team member or Scrum Master (see section 3.2.6.3) in the agile team they were working in. The rationale for choosing these people was their extensive years of work experience in self-organising teams. The expectation was that with increasing experience of working in self-organising teams, the best possible view on shared leadership competencies may be obtained. Moreover, the industry branch that the interview partners were working in ranged from consulting and medicine to telecommunication, and they were working in different companies, which was an added advantage. The aim of the interviews was to confirm or to enhance the identified areas of shared leadership. For the interviews, a template for the semi-structured interviews
(Easterby-Smith et al., 2008b) was created, separated by the identified competence areas (see section 3.4) as listed in Table 10.
Table 10: Template for the Semi-structured Interviews (items marked with * adapted from (Moe et al., 2009a))
General Questions
Question Answer Comments/Purpose
How much work experience do you have in Agile teams?
In what roles have you worked in an Agile team?
What Agile methodology have you used? Kanban, Scrum, mixture of Waterfall/Scrum
What competencies do you think a person working in an Agile team should have? Technical/Social
What competencies do you think a ‘leader’ in an Agile team should have?
Competence Areas of Shared Leadership in Agile Teams
Question Answer Comments/Purpose
Is everyone in the team involved in the decision making process?*
Is the decision authority shared?
Are the decisions made depending on the task by the person with the most experience in the area in which the decision is to be made?
Is there a difference between authority and task overall authority?
Do team members make important decisions without consulting other team members?*
Is there only one person taking the decision, e.g. the Scrum Master?
Question Area Team Vision
Question Answer Comments/purpose
How is the team vision defined?* Is there a single person defining the team vision, or is the team vision defined by the team? How is the team vision presented and
made visible in the team?*
Is the team vision presented by a single person? Is the team vision presented only for a sub- task?
How is the vision expressed and shared among team members?
Question area Shared Agile Team Design Competence
Question Answer Comments
Is the team designed (and redesigned) according to its purpose?*
How is the decision made if a team needs to be designed or re-designed? How is it recognised if some team members have specific potential (strength/weaknesses)?
How and when are these specific weaknesses discussed, if at all?
Question area Shared Agile Communication Competence
Question Answer Comments
How is the communication in an agile team performed?
Do team members
communicate directly with one another?
Does communication only go via the project leader, e.g. Scrum Master? How is information about the project
received?
From other team members?
Only from the Scrum Master or one responsible person?
How does communication take place among the team members sharing one sub-task?
Question area Shared Agile Coordination Competence
Question Answer Comments
How is the work related to sub-tasks within the team harmonised,
coordinated?
Is the work harmonised, separated, and
equally/fairly distributed? Is a clear goal for any sub-tasks
communicated?
How is the goal for the sub-tasks communicated?
There were clear and fully comprehended goals for sub-tasks within our team
How is the work for sub-tasks
distributed? Do team members decide on their own or are the tasks given by someone else?
Summary Questions
Question Answer Comments
After having answered all the questions, do you see now different competence areas needed for shared leadership? How do you see shared leadership in agile teams? Do you think that leadership is shared?
Do you feel that you have taken over leadership in an agile team? Even when you have not had a ‘formal’ leadership role? If so, what were the most useful skills you used to take over the ‘non- formal’ leadership role?
Do you wish to make any other comments?
The qualitative interviews were evaluated according to the standards proposed by Mayring (2000) and followed a qualitative content analysis method. By undertaking the evaluation according to Mayring (2000) standards, the aim is to reduce the material in such a way that the essential content is retained with consistency, while having a manageable amount of data. For instance, the content analysis revealed that team design competence was not confirmed during the interviews with statements like ‘The team had all the competencies needed to perform the assigned tasks’ or ‘If a competency was missing the team member was sent to a training course’. Therefore, it seems that the teams were not re-structured during an iteration or during the lifetime of the project. In most of the cases, the team was established with the required amount of manpower and the technical competencies needed; therefore, there was no need to change the setup. One respondent said that if a person could not cope with the work tasks assigned, his/her tasks were assigned to another person. It seems that even if the team is a self-organising team and by definition flexible in terms of the scope of the product, changes to the team structure seemed to be kept to a minimum, which is in agreement with what is stated in the Scrum guidelines (Schwaber, 2008).
Further the interviews revealed that in a self-organising team, social skills seem to be an important factor for project success and teamwork. All of the interview partners opined that a leader in an agile team should be a team player and should combine technical competence with highly developed social skill competency. Statements such as ‘A person in an agile team should be a good team player and have a positive attitude’ confirmed this.
West (2012) separated the social dimension of teamwork into three functions: social support, support for growth and development, and general social climate. Thus, the originally defined shared leadership competence areas (section 5.1) were changed after reflection; ‘team design’ was removed and replaced by ‘teamwork/sociable’ according to the outcome of the interviews. All the other shared leadership areas remained the same.