Putting the “Socio” In Socio-Technical Development: Investigating the Effects of Psychological Safety in Agile Information Systems Development

An essential part of project management is the management of teams, their actions, and their social systems. Team processes, behavior, and routines used by team members play important parts in the success of projects. Over the last two decades, agile methods have become a dominating force in information systems development approaches. Agile methods emphasize both the need for accepting and embracing constant change in the project and its environment as well as the need for many, regular, and close social interactions within the team. These aspects have been defining for the incarnation of agile practices, such as daily stand-up meetings or retrospectives. Contrary to what one might expect, agile projects still have come short of their anticipated benefits and research has yet to find answers why. The concept of psychological safety could be suited perfectly to explain — and reverse — the shortcomings of agile methods. As agile methods describe a multitude of practices to implement as team routines aimed at fostering team responses to changes and team interactions, these practices present themselves as critical artifacts for effective project management. At the same time, to reap the benefits of these highly interactive and social- focused agile practices, team members need to feel safe to speak freely and openly, which has been conceptualized as psychological safety. How these concepts interact and what this implies for (agile) project management, however, is unknown. This dissertation addresses this puzzle by conducting four independent yet interrelated studies that (1) formally investigate the current body of knowledge and motivates the need for novel explanations, (2) conduct exploratory research to derive a model of the interaction between agile practices, psychological safety, and resilience, (3) offers a quantitative evaluation of the preliminary model, as well as (4) provide additional robustness checks by evaluating a rival theory. Collectively, these studies advance our understanding of the interweaving of agile practices, psychological safety, and resilience, therefore paving the way for improved agile project management