ABSTRACT
Purpose: The Important
principles of the Agile Manifesto can be identified directly or indirectly from
the characteristics of a team Agile development. It works by iterative and
incremental cycles of creating value for the user, it is self-organized, in
constant collaboration with his client, and tries to continuously improve by
wearing a critical look at his activity and his way of function. Faced with
this wide variety of choices, an inevitable question arises for companies
wishing to deploy Agile: How does empowerment occur through an interactional
change in Agile team developments? To address this research question, this
article follows a grounded theory approach and draws on 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews with team members and
project managers working with the Agile approach. From analyzing the teams and
their interactions, the creation of empowerment through continuous interactions
with their stakeholders in the organizational context of petroleum industries. Design/Method/Approach: In order to understand the principles of the Agile method and the empowerment of the team in the context of Agile, we
conducted an exploratory case study in a petroleum company. This study is based
on twenty semi-structured interviews with fifteen project managers and team
members using the Agile method. Each interview took approximately 45 - 120 min. These face-to-face interviews aided to record the verbal
information and capture the interviewee’s expressions and tone. All these
interviews were transcribed for analysis. The NVivo software analysis was used
to gather the data for the research. This data helped in developing more
knowledge about tasks allocated to Agile teams. We applied open coding, the
Strauss, and Corbin GT’s procedure of data analysis to participants’
transcribed interview responses. In addition to Interviews, we accompanied the
teams of developers for seven months. This engagement allowed us to write
observation notes and have discussions informal with developers and project
managers at the corporate. Findings: We categorized the data with short
phrases that summarize the most important
points during a codification. These were condensed into two to three words,
captured in the NVivo. As a result, different concepts from similar codes
appeared one the most prominent of which was task allocation through
self-assignment. Others included manager-driven, manager-assisted, team-driven,
and team-assisted task allocation. This article shows us the Agile methods at
Work series. Whether for a project manager, a software developer, or a
senior manager, this series is designed to help them to get greater agility
from their team members. Our research was carried out within a petroleum corporate industry Shell Upstream
LTD in Tunisia. The company specializes in Oil and Gas Extraction, Mining,
Quarrying, Crude petroleum, and natural gas. The company, therefore, offers its
customers advice, expertise, monitoring, and support. This research has
contributed to Agile practitioners. Our explanations of the positive consequence of self-assignment should
promote novice Agile teams and their managers to attempt self-assignment
as a key practice. Also, Agile teams trying to be self-organized to get
solutions to their challenges in this study. Our results can be applied as a
guide for the project managers to facilitate self-organization by empowering team members. The grounded theory is presented in a
form that can be understood through well-defined: context, causal conditions,
and a strategy applied by Agile teams to practice self-organization
work. Originality/Value: The present study’s new conceptualization of
empowerment as the interaction between the team and the stakeholders:
Empowerment tends to be analyzed either from the view of the team participating in empowering manager behaviors to foster, among
other aspects, the project manager of teams or from the perspective of the team’s
collective sense of being empowered. Research
considering both perspectives tends to view empowering managers’ behaviors as
ancestors of team empowerment. Empowerment tends to be studied either from the
perspective of the leader engaging in empowering leadership behaviors to
foster, among other aspects, the self-leadership of teams or from the
perspective of the team’s collective sense of being empowered. Research
considering both perspectives tends to view empowering leadership
behaviors as antecedents of team empowerment. From a managerial perspective,
some managerial perspectives for the corporate are provided in this research.
Based on the underlying results, there are three main processes that managers
and organizations can address to realize the most practical benefits.