Chapter 6 The Role of Power Asymmetry and Paradoxical Leadership in Software Development Team Agility

To facilitate innovative software development, more and more software development teams (SDTs) turn to agile methods. Such agile methods develop both extensive and efficient software responses to a client’s requirement change. However, the antecedents of successful agile software development are poorly understood. The authors goal is to propose a model of how power asymmetry and paradoxical leadership interact and affect agility in SDTs, which in turn affect their capacity to innovate. By leveraging insights from research on individuals’ cognition, the authors argue that developers with relatively higher power evaluate their contributions to their teams more ambivalently, which increases their delay or postponement of their contributions to their teams’ tasks. As a result, power asymmetry is negatively related to software teams’ response extensiveness and efficiency. Second, and drawing on leadership studies on behavioral complexity, the authors consider the moderating role of paradoxical leadership that a team receives as an important moderating factor to this effect. The authors argue that, when team leaders exhibit paradoxical leadership behaviors, high-power individuals’ ambivalence is less likely to emerge; hence, transforming power asymmetry to an asset for the enhancement of agility in the SDT.