How to enable leadership among self-organizing developers

Other conference contribution, 2019

This paper addresses leadership in relation to self-organization and coordination both within and between groups. We draw on the work of Crevani et al. (2010) who conceptualize leadership as emergent from relations in terms of co-orientation and action-spacing and study two comparable cases in two different product development organizations. Both cases concern individuals who assume the responsibility of enabling leadership in groups rather than being the leaders themselves. One of the cases concerns groups of representatives that gather temporarily to coordinate specific inter-group dependencies and the other case concerns self-organizing work groups that are stable over time. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, patterns of practice are identified that are used to enable co-orientation and action-spacing both in intra- and inter-group coordination.