Autonomous agile teams: Challenges and future directions for research

According to the principles articulated in the agile manifesto, motivated and empowered software developers relying on technical excellence and simple designs, create business value by delivering working software to users at regular short intervals. These principles have spawned many practices. At the core of these practices is the idea of autonomous, self-managing, or self-organizing teams whose members work at a pace that sustains their creativity and productivity. This article summarizes the main challenges faced when implementing autonomous teams and the topics and research questions that future research should address

Die Erfassung von Job-Tasks in persönlichen Befragungen. Ein neues Instrument zur Erhebung von Anforderungen am Arbeitsplatz

The analysis of job tasks has become a field of growing scientific activity in recent years. Information on such tasks has been used to analyze various research questions, especially regarding changes in the overall structure of the economy and their implications for persons and firms. Arguably the most prominent of these research questions is the analysis of the consequences of technological change for job tasks, skill demand, and wage inequality. Despite the growing importance of this field of research, the range of actual task measures to be used in empirical analyses is rather limited. Therefore, we considered it worthwhile to develop a survey instrument to measure job tasks by asking the job holders directly. The resulting questionnaire module was administered in the fourth panel wave of the German National Educational Panel Study's (NEPS) adult stage. In this paper, we provide an overview of our conceptual background as well as the steps taken during the development of the survey instrument. Furthermore, we present an initial exploratory analysis of the data collected to validate the instrument

Multiple constituencies of trust: a study of the Oman military

This paper presents findings from a study of employees' multiple trust foci. Social exchange theory and the notions of conceptual and cognitive distance are used to generate hypotheses on the anticipated effects of specific trust relationships on employees' attitudinal and behavioural outcomes such as intention to quit, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and organizational citizenship behaviours. Data from Omani military personnel suggest that employees distinguish between trust in the organization, trust in their direct boss and trust in co-workers. Several important attitudinal and behavioural outcomes are predicted by these specific trust foci