Although formal control in teams is often conceptualized as manager-imposed, recent literature suggests that teams can enact formal control themselves through codified, mandatory, and repeatable practices. We argue that agile practices such as iterative delivery, retrospective review, and automated testing function as team-managed formal controls (TMFC), distinct from traditional managerial controls. Drawing on configurational control theory and the enabling versus authoritative control lens, we examine behavioral (BC), output (OC), and emergent outcome control (EOC) alongside TMFC and test their associations with agile project success. Using multilevel modeling with 344 respondents across 57 agile teams, we find that enabling controls (EOC, TMFC) are positively associated with perceived solution impacts and TMFC is consistently associated with perceived solution quality. Output control is positively associated with solution impacts but not quality, and behavioral control shows no positive associations with either outcome. We also find a negative interaction between TMFC and BC: When both are strongly present, the positive association between team-managed practices and outcomes is effectively zero, suggesting these control logics conflict when co-enacted. Decomposing TMFC reveals that iterative delivery drives the positive main effect, whereas automated testing is the primary locus of conflict with BC. Team-level, project-level, and subscale-level analyses confirm these findings. Our findings extend configurational control theory by introducing TMFC as a distinct enabling mechanism, revealing the differential roles of specific practices, and identifying a conflict between team-managed and behavioral control not observed with output or emergent outcome control.

Although agile methodologies prescribe various practices, they universally focus on obtaining feedback. Agile practitioners argue that this feedback allows teams to better adapt to uncertainty, which can lead to increases in software quality. Using a sample of 76 agile teams across multiple organizations, we investigate the impacts of agile feedback practices of technical feedback, fast iterative delivery, and agile project management on software quality. Also, we investigate interaction effects between agile feedback practice use and six different sub-constructs of uncertainty. We find that a higher level of use of some agile feedback practices directly impacts software quality and moderates the effects of uncertainty on software quality. However, we find a more complex relationship between agile methodologies and software quality than previously identified. These findings illustrate future research opportunities into the complicated relationship between agile methodology usage and external environmental factors.

While many factors drive the sharing economy’s growth, trust and motivations play critical roles. However, which factors are more important to young consumers? This research compares a trust model with a motivation model for predicting intention to use Airbnb, Uber, and TaskRabbit, comparing within each platform, not between them. The study uses a survey sample of Midwest United States business undergraduates (nearly all Generation Z). Each sample varies in experience levels: relatively high experience Uber respondents, very low experience TaskRabbit respondents, and medium experience for Airbnb. Results show that within Uber, the trust model predicts significantly better than the motivation model. Within Airbnb and TaskRabbit, the motivation model predicts only slightly better. By combining the trust and motivation variables into one model by platform, we find differing degrees of complementarity between the trust and motivation variables, with those for Airbnb being the most complementary in terms of predictive power and those for Uber being the least complementary. Within Airbnb and TaskRabbit, combining the trust and motivation models shows the two most significant variables were enjoyment and trusting intention. Within Uber, trusting intention and trusting beliefs in the provider were the most significant. We provide implications and directions for future research.

Today, organizations tailor the practices from several agile methodologies to serve their particular environment. But are there situations that drive how an organization should tailor methodologies in a particular manner? This article places 12 commonly used agile development practices into a typology based upon whether they are primarily project management focused or software development approach focused and examines how organizations’ motivations for adopting agile impact the practices they adopt. Finally, it explores how a fit between an organization’s motives for agile method adoption and the tailored agile practices it adopts may lead (or not lead) to differences in project performance.