Abstract To have engaged and high-performing agile teams are what most organizations strive for. At the same time, there is little research on the drivers of team work engagement in the software context. Team autonomy and trust are crucial for agile teams and are suggested as potential boosters of team work engagement and performance. In this study, we apply the Job Demands-Resources model to examine the role of autonomy and trust and their impact on work engagement and team performance in agile teams. We analyze quantitative survey data from 236 team members in 43 agile teams to examine how team autonomy and trust relate to team work engagement and how engagement mediates the relationship between these factors and performance. Our results show that while both autonomy and trust are positively related to team work engagement, team trust plays a more critical role than team autonomy. Teams with high team trust showed higher engagement, which enhanced team performance. Our results highlight the importance of social factors such as trust in creating conditions for high performance in agile teams through its effect on team work engagement.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a natural experiment of an unprecedented scale as companies closed their offices and sent employees to work from home. Many managers were concerned that their engineers would not be able to work effectively from home, or lack the motivation to do so, and that they would lose control and not even notice when things go wrong. As many companies announced their post-COVID permanent remote-work or hybrid home/office policies, the question of what can be expected from software engineers who work from home becomes more and more relevant. AIMS: To understand the nature of home telework we analyze the evidence of perceived changes in productivity comparing office work before the pandemic with the work from home during the pandemic from thirteen empirical surveys of practitioners. METHOD: We analyzed data from six corporate surveys conducted in four Scandinavian companies combined with the results of seven published surveys studying the perceived changes in productivity in industrial settings. In addition, we sought explanations for the variation in perceived productivity among the engineers from the studied companies through the qualitative analysis of open-ended questions and interviews. RESULTS: Combined results of 7686 data points suggest that though on average perceived productivity has not changed significantly, there are developers who report being more productive, and developers being less productive when working from home. Positively affected individuals in some surveys form large groups of respondents (up to 50%) and mention benefiting from a better organization of work, increased flexibility and focus. Yet, there are equally large groups of negatively affected respondents (up to 51%) who complain about the challenges related to remote teamwork and collaboration, as well as emotional issues, distractions and poor home office environment and equipment. Finally, positive trends are found in longitudinal surveys, i.e., developers' productivity in the later months of the pandemic show better results than those in the earlier months. CONCLUSIONS: We conclude that behind the average "no change" lays a large variation of experiences, which means that the work from home might not be for everyone. Yet, a longitudinal analysis of the surveys is encouraging, as it shows that the more pessimistic results might be influenced by the initial experiences of an unprecedented crisis. At the end, we put forward the lessons learned during the pandemic that can inspire the new post-pandemic work policies.