Ad-hoc leadership in agile software development environments

Abstract

Leadership is the ability to influence people, leading them to behave in a certain way in order to achieve the group's goals. Leadership is independent of job titles and descriptions. Usually, however, in order to lead, leaders need the power derived from their organizational positions. There are different leadership styles, like task-oriented versus people-oriented, directive versus permissive, autocrat versus democrat. In this paper, we examine the leadership concept in software development environments and focus on leadership in transition processes to agile software development. Specifically, based on our comprehensive research on agile software development, we suggest a leadership style - ad-hoc leadership - that usually emerges in such change processes. We present the characteristics, dynamic and uniqueness of this leadership style and illustrate its usefulness for the analysis of representative scenarios. © 2010 ACM.