Individual empowerment of agile and non-agile software developers in small teams

TLDR: Agile developers have a higher sense of being able to impact the organisation than non-agile developers and have information channels that is significantly differently from non-AGile developers.

Abstract: Context Empowerment of employees at work has been known to have a positive impact on job motivation and satisfaction. Software development is a field of knowledge work wherein one should also expect to see these effects, and the idea of empowerment has become particularly visible in agile methodologies, in which proponents emphasise team empowerment and individual control of the work activities as a central concern. Objective This research aims to get a better understanding of how empowerment is enabled in software development teams, both agile and non-agile, to identify differences in empowering practices and levels of individual empowerment. Method Twenty-five interviews with agile and non-agile developers from Norway and Canada on decision making and empowerment are analysed. The analysis is conducted using a conceptual model with categories for involvement, structural empowerment and psychological empowerment. Results Both kinds of development organisations are highly empowered and they are similar in most aspects relating to empowerment. However, there is a distinction in the sense that agile developers have more possibilities to select work tasks and influence the priorities in a development project due to team empowerment. Agile developers seem to put a higher emphasis on the value of information in decision making, and have more prescribed activities to enable low-cost information flow. More power is obtained through the achievement of managing roles for the non-agile developers who show interest and are rich in initiatives. Conclusion Agile developers have a higher sense of being able to impact the organisation than non-agile developers and have information channels that is significantly differently from non-agile developers. For non-agile teams, higher empowerment can be obtained by systematically applying low-cost participative decision making practices in the manager–developer relation and among peer developers. For agile teams, it is essential to more rigorously follow the empowering practices already established.