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This study aims to create a better understanding of how practitioners implement and work Agile while balancing the tensions arising between stability and change.

A grounded theory approach was used to explore what happens in practice when software development teams implement and work Agile. The empirical data consists of twenty semi-structured interviews with practitioners working in fourteen different organizations and in six different Agile roles.

As a result, a substantive theory was presented of continuously balancing between stability and change in Agile teams. In addition, the study also proposes three guidelines that can help organizations about to change their way of working to Agile.

The inherent limitation of a grounded theory study is that a substantial theory can only explain the specific contexts explored in that study. Thus, this study's contribution is a substantial theory that needs to be further developed and improved.

The proposed guidelines can help organizations about to change their way of working to Agile. They can also assist organizations in switching from “doing Agile” to “being Agile”, thus becoming more successful.

The new perspective that this study contributes is the fact that our discovered categories show that several inherent processes are ongoing at the same time in order to balance the need to have both stability and change.

This study examines trust-repair practices at the team level after organizational change.

A qualitative research approach was adopted, and data were collected from key informants through focus group discussions and interviews. The data analysis involved thematic coding and followed the structured procedure.

This study found that after organization change, trust can be repaired at the team level by improving team leaders' information sharing and knowledge in change management, and by enforcing communication, collaboration and ethical behaviour among team members.

This paper makes three key contributions by (1) identifying trust violations in teams, (2) proposing trust-repair mechanisms and (3) extending the understanding of trust-repair and preservation at the team level following organizational change.

This paper provides practical information from a real-work context and can improve managers' understanding of active trust-repair.

This paper outlines active trust-repair mechanisms in an organizational change context and expands the current theory by presenting novel insights into organizational trust-repair at the team level. This study contributes to trust literature by proposing promising avenues for future trust-repair research.

Literature reveals ongoing debates around the role of business analysts in agile software development (ASD) teams. This can be attributed, in part, to a knowledge gap concerning how business analysts contribute to overall team capabilities, particularly those which are essential in enabling teams to respond to fast-paced environmental changes. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by investigating how business analysts (BAs) contribute to the dynamic capabilities of ASD teams.

Through a deductive approach, this study adapted and applied a research model based on the team dynamic capabilities (DC) theory to explore the contributions of BAs in agile teams. The study was executed using a qualitative, single case study research strategy directed at an ASD team in the financial services industry. Moreover, data were collected through face-to-face, semi-structured interviews; a focus group; non-participant observation and physical artefacts review. The thematic analysis technique was used to analyse the data.

The study contributes to teams DC theory through four theoretical propositions centred on the role of BAs. The proposition highlights how BAs relationship management, tacit knowledge sharing, task mental models and transactive memory are key contributors of ASD teams' DC. The study also found that BAs contribute to ASD teams' ability to embrace agile principles 2, 4, 6 and 12. This study can inform the design of capacity development programmes for individual team members and BAs and thus help managers curate teams that will best promote DC.

This study can inform the design of capacity development programmes for individual team members and BAs and thus help managers curate teams that will best promote DC.

This study builds on the relatively few studies which focus on DC within software development (SD) teams and ASD project teams. Moreover, the study explores how an individual (i.e. a BA) can contribute to the DC of a team.

This study aims to investigate how configurations of boundary objects (BOs) support innovation teams in developing innovative product concepts. Specifically, it explores the effectiveness of different artefact configurations in facilitating collaboration and bridging knowledge boundaries during the concept development process.

The research is based on data from ten undergraduate innovation teams working with an industry partner in a creative industry. Six categories of BOs are identified, which serve as tools for collaboration. The study applies fsQCA (fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis) to analyse the configurations employed by the teams to bridge knowledge boundaries and support the development of innovative product concepts.

The findings of the study reveal two distinct groups of configurations: product envisioning and product design. The configurations within the “product envisioning” group support the activities of visioning and pivoting, enabling teams to innovate the product concept by altering the product vision. On the other hand, the configurations within the “product design” group facilitate experimenting, modelling and prototyping, allowing teams to design the attributes of the innovative product concept while maintaining the product vision.

This research contributes to the field of innovation by providing insights into the role of BOs and their configurations in supporting innovation teams during concept development. The results suggest that configurations of “product envisioning” support bridging semantic knowledge boundaries, while configurations within “product design” bridge pragmatic knowledge boundaries. This understanding contributes to the broader field of knowledge integration and innovation in design contexts.

Why are some lean workfloor teams able to improve their already high performance, over time, and others not? By studying teams' and leaders' behaviour-value patterns, this abductive field study uncovers a dynamic capability at the team level.

Various methods were employed over three consecutive years to thoroughly examine five initially high-performing lean workfloor teams, including their leaders. These methods encompassed micro-behavioural coding of 59 h of film footage, surveys, individual and group interviews, participant observation and archival data, involving objective and perceptual team-performance indicators. Two of the five teams continued to improve and perform highly.

Continuously improving high lean team performance is found to be associated with (1) team behaviours such as frequent performance monitoring, information sharing, peer support and process improvement; (2) team leaders who balance, over time, task- and relations-oriented behaviours; (3) higher-level leaders who keep offering the team face-to-face support, strategic clarity and tangible resources; (4) these three actors' endorsement of self-transcendence and openness-to-change work values and alignment, over time, with their behaviours; and (5) coactive vicarious learning-by-doing as a “stable collective activity pattern” among team, team leader, and higher-level leadership.

Since lean has been undertheorised, the authors invoked insights from organisational behaviour and management theories, in combination with various fine- and coarse-grained data, over time. The authors uncovered actors' behaviour-value patterns and a collective learning-by-doing pattern that may explain continuous lean team performance improvement. Four theory-enriching propositions were developed and visualised in a refined model which may already benefit lean practitioners.

Building on the routine dynamics literature, this paper aims to expand our philosophical, practical and infrastructural understanding of implementing lean production. The authors provide a process view on the interplay between lean operating routines and continuous improvement (CI) routines and the roles of different actors in initiating and establishing these routines.

Using data from interviews, observations and document analysis, retrospective comparative analyses of three embedded case studies on lean implementations provide a process understanding of enacting and patterning lean operating and CI routines in manufacturing SMEs.

Incorporating the “who” and “how” next to the “what” of practices and routines helps explain that rather than being implemented in isolation or even in conjunction with each other, sustainable lean practices and routines come about through team leader and employee enactment of the CI practices and routines. Neglecting these patterns aligned with unsustainable implementations.

The proposed process model provides a valuable way to integrate variance and process streams of literature to better understand lean production implementations.

The process model helps manufacturing managers, policy makers, consultants and educators to reconsider their approach to implementing lean production or teaching how to do so.

Nuancing the existing lean implementation literature, the proposed process model shows that CI routines do not stem from implementing lean operating routines. Rather, the model highlights the importance of active engagement of actors at multiple organizational levels and strong connections between and across levels to change routines and work practices for implementing lean production.

Business leaders are facing a change of role as digitalization continues to intensify in organizations. As technological change is bringing back supposedly old virtues of leadership, this study aims to explain the impact digital transformation has on leadership due to organizational size.

Cross-border study with experts from multinational enterprises (MNEs) in Austria and small and medium companies (SMEs) in Italy.

With increasing digitalization, leadership is becoming more important. In times of social distance, it is essential that leaders actively foster the management of relationships with their employees, manage social processes in their teams and shape change processes. This requires a bundle of skills consisting of effective leadership skills, strong change management skills and conceptual digitization skills.

Digital transformation is not mainly about implementing new technologies; it is about developing an appropriate strategy in which people are key. Organizations regardless of size need to recognize that digital transformation requires not less, but even more active shaping of the relationships between leaders and their team members. Consequently, they need active leaders who drive, communicate and implement technological change. As leadership and change require time, resources and, above all, attention, executive selection and qualification are critical for the broad integration of digitalization ideas into an organization.

People, not technology, drive digital transformation, and organizations require leaders, not necessarily technological specialists, to manage the complex changes that comprise an organization’s digital transformation. Technical and methodological skills can be substituted with the use of new technologies, but leaders’ interactional, social, strategic and conceptual skills are gaining in importance.

The purpose of this paper is to understand how inspection team members work together to conduct surveys of hospitals, the challenges teams may face and how these might be addressed.

Data were gathered through an evaluation of a new regulatory model for acute hospitals in England, implemented by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) during 2013-2014. The authors interviewed key stakeholders, observed inspections and surveyed and interviewed inspection team members and hospital staff. Common characteristics of temporary teams provided an analytical framework.

The temporary nature of the inspection teams hindered the conduct of some inspection activities, despite the presence of organisational citizenship behaviours. In a minority of sub-teams, there were tensions between CQC employed inspectors, healthcare professionals, lay people and CQC data analysts. Membership changes were infrequent and did not appear to inhibit team functioning, with members displaying high commitment. Although there were leadership authority ambiguities, these were not problematic. Existing processes of recruitment and selection, training and preparation and to some extent leadership, did not particularly lend themselves to addressing the challenges arising from the temporary nature of the teams.

Conducting the research during the piloting of the new regulatory approach may have accentuated some challenges. There is scope for further research on inspection team leadership.

Issues may arise if inspection and accreditation agencies deploy temporary, heterogeneous survey teams.

This research is the first to illuminate the functioning of inspection survey teams by applying a temporary teams perspective.

This research aims to identify and organise the conditions of organisational readiness for digital transformation.

This qualitative study comprises three case studies within manufacturing companies from different sizes and industries located in Sweden. Plant visits and in-depth interviews bring to light companies' experiences with initial steps towards digital transformation. A set of conditions for digital organisational readiness was translated into a questionnaire and tested with one of the studied companies.

This paper organises and tests digital organisational readiness conditions to support companies' initial steps on digital transformation. The results are put in perspective of established change management theory and previous studies about digital transformation. The findings will conclude in a questionnaire to support dialogue and digital organisational readiness assessments.

Additional conditions for the initial phase of digital transformation could possibly be found if more cases had been included in the study.

The article identifies a set of conditions translated into a questionnaire that should be used as a dialogue tool to create strategic alignment and support companies in their initial discussions. If this process can be faster and more efficient, the company can achieve a competitive advantage against competitors.

This research's relevance relies on the fact that companies are advancing in adopting digital technologies without being ready from an organisational perspective. This gap creates barriers for companies' digital maturing processes, stopping them from having full access to digital technologies' benefits.

Crises such as the Coronavirus pandemic pose extraordinary challenges to the decision making in management teams. Teams need to integrate available information quickly to make informed decisions on the spot and update their decisions as new information becomes available. Moreover, making good decisions is hard as it requires sacrifices for the common good, and finally, implementing the decisions made is not easy as it requires persistence in the face of strong counterproductive social pressures.

We provide a “psychology of action” perspective on making team-based management decisions in crisis by introducing collective implementation intentions (We-if-then plans) as a theory-based intervention tool to improve decision processes. We discuss our program of research on forming and acting on We-if-then plans in ad hoc teams facing challenging situations.

Teams with We-if-then plans consistently made more informed decisions when information was socially or temporally distributed, when decision makers had to make sacrifices for the common good, and when strong social pressures opposed acting on their decisions. Preliminary experimental evidence indicates that assigning simple We-if-then plans had similar positive effects as providing a leader to steer team processes.

Our analysis of self-regulated team decisions helps understand and improve how management teams can make and act on good decisions in crises such as the Coronavirus pandemic.