Abstract:

Purpose: Agile project teams are self-managing and self-organizing teams. These two characteristics are pivotal attributes of emergent leadership. Emergent leadership, in other words, is a key feature of agile teams. Existing empirical evidence however seriously lacks research on the critical question: what are the characteristics of informal emergent leaders? While recognizing this gap, we address this question by employing social network analysis (SNA) to identify emergent leaders in agile software teams. The aim of this study is to shed light on the characteristics of an emergent leader through which he becomes influential within the team.

Methodology/Design: Using purposive sampling, we selected eight agile teams from five IT organizations of different sizes were selected. Face-to-face semi-structured interviews were conducted. The duration of each interview with the members of the agile teams was 45-60 minutes. Informed consent was taken from the participants.

Findings: From our study, five key dimensions related to the personality of an emergent leader are identified. These dimensions are 1) Traits 2) Knowledge 3) Skills 4) Abilities 5) Experience.

Originality: Emergent leadership is a relatively new phenomenon, where leaders emerge from within teams without having a formal leadership assigned role. A challenge remains as to what personality attributes help to gain legitimacy despite their informal status. We contribute to the emergent leadership literature by showing different personality aspects suitable for emergent leadership within teams. We also show some limitations of the approaches used and offer some useful insights.

Keywords: Emergent Leadership, Agile, Social Network Analysis, Informal Leadership.

Please choose your submission type: Full Paper

Primary Track: Leadership and Leadership Development

Keywords: Traditional paradigms of leadership, including traits, behaviour and contingency approaches,Leadership skills and development,Transformational leadership in organisations,Strategic leadership,Emerging leadership theories

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Ms. Marya Tabassum