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- Bremer, Constantin, 1995, et al.
(författare)
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Agile Organizations: Challenges and Tensions from the Employee Perspective
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 22nd International CINet Conference. - 9789077360248 ; , s. 94-103
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Amidst increasingly dynamic and complex environments, new organizational forms deviating from the traditional managerial hierarchy and its underlying principles have emerged. Meanwhile, the agile movement has taken organizations of all types and sizes by storm. What started as a methodology for managing software development projects in a more pragmatic and human-centered way grew into a philosophy shaping the design of entire organizations, and further research on agile organizations is being called for. Viewed through the lens of self-managing organizations, we investigate agile organizations from the dynamic and social perspective of organizing. Drawing on interviews conducted with employees of a Swedish software company, we identify the tension of freedom–clarity as dominant and portray the related challenges employees experience as they navigate the agile organization. We also pinpoint inclusion, proactivity and trust as values agile organizations seem to be built upon, much in line with the thinking of the Agile Manifesto. Finally, we call for further research on new organizational forms from the organizing perspective and offer a refined framework to better reflect the dynamic, intertwined and inherently social nature of the challenges to be experienced within these organizational forms.
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| 2. |
- Bremer, Constantin, 1995, et al.
(författare)
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Practicing Agility: Proposing an Agile Organization Design Manifesto
- 2022
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The interest in business agility and agile organizations is high on CEOs’ agendas in response to rising degrees of uncertainty and change. In line with dominating management theories, agility is typically positioned as an organization’s capability to be flexible, and agile organizations are entities which successfully leverage this capability for managing turbulent environments. In this paper, we develop an alternative to this agility as capability paradigm, focusing instead on what it means to practice agility from the inside. We draw on Mary Parker Follett and the experiences of managers and employees in a case study of an organization “born agile”, designed according to the principles of the Agile Manifesto, to outline the agility as practice paradigm, which gives primacy to people and relationships rather than focusing on assets, methods and tools. Based on the tension-embracing agility as practice paradigm, we develop a Manifesto for Agile Organization Design and discuss implications for managers and employees navigating the agile organizational space. In essence, this manifesto requires all organizational members to adopt, embrace and enact a creative and experimental attitude that seeks to collaboratively find new ways forward, seeing tensions as opportunities for finding a new common ground, leadership as distributed, strategy and organization design as emergent and structures as flexible.
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| 3. |
- Rylander Eklund, Anna, 1972, et al.
(författare)
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Towards a Follettian foundation for self-managing organizations: Learning to lead together through making together
- 2022
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- The interest in self-managing organizations has grown steadily in the past decade as indicated by the rising number of popular management books that explore ‘new ways of working’ based on ‘progressive’ or ‘liberated’ organizations like Semco, W.L. Gore, Buurtzorg and Zappos. A new field of research is emerging that examines these self-managing organizations as ‘a novel organizational form’ characterized by their ‘radical decentralization of authority’ (Lee and Edmondson, 2017), focusing on the structural characteristics that set these organizations apart from others. In this paper we propose an alternative perspective for exploring these organizations; based on the relational process philosophy of Mary Parker Follett and a review of the most influential practitioner-oriented books in the ‘new ways of working’ movement, we suggest that what unites these organizations is processual worldview and a profound belief in the capacity of all people to act intelligently and creatively given the right conditions. We argue that Follett’s conceptualization of group organizing and integrative attitude offers an appropriate foundation for developing a language to describe a processual, relational worldview that underpins a collaborative, participatory process of self-governance that could better support the exploration of the practices of organizations in the ‘new ways of working’ movement.
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