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Top1. Introduction
Information Technology (IT) has currently been considered an important business activity, by itself, creating its own industry, and also supporting the activities of other industries. The IT environment is very dynamic and highly competitive which demands organizations to become constantly and creatively innovate. Companies have been going through a process of transformation. The way they are managed has been adapted to respond more quickly to the market, which has also been changing with extraordinary speed.
Nowadays, many companies, from diverse segments, recognize the importance of strategic competence for the success of their business and have been adopting models and techniques of project management. In fact, project management has reached considerable levels of importance in IT companies, especially those that need to experience transformation processes (Aubry, 2015). The objective of these companies is to adopt a model of organization that allows them to provide effective and agile responses to the environment and organizational demands. The application of this practice is widely used in the development of IT projects, both in large and small companies.
There are generally two distinct conceptual approaches for the management of software processes: traditional and Agile. While traditional is characterized by a rigid, sequential, and well-defined process that originates too much documentation, the Agile approach is based on principles of flexibility and participation of the customer of the process, which essentially cares about having the software working with the minimum of documentation required. Therefore, the adoption of more streamlined processes, such as Agile methodologies, has motivated a great deal of interest among software development communities (Stellman & Greene, 2013; LeMay, 2018).
According to Fowler & Highsmith (2001), the Agile Manifesto is based on four basic pillars: (i) individuals and interaction over processes and tools; (ii) working software over comprehensive documentation; (iii) customer collaboration over contract negotiation; and (iv) responding to change over following a plan. Many other definitions exist in the literature that emphasizes the following terms: continuous delivery, collaboration, trust, efficiency, sustainability, simplicity, self-organization, and focus on technical excellence (Laanti et al., 2013; Hemon et al., 2020).
Traditional leadership styles that have worked in the past also need to evolve and adapt to the emergence of Agile methodologies. Like it is presented in the first principle of Agile methodologies, people assume a fundamental role in the entire software development process, without which it is not possible to create robust software that is simultaneously adaptable to environmental changes and user's needs. In the literature, the number of existing studies on leadership applied to the Agile software development context is quite limited. Most studies related to leadership in the IT field are independent of the adopted project management model. However, as highlighted by Hidalgo (2018) and Niederman et al. (2018), leadership in Agile environments is particularly challenging when it comes to involving multidisciplinary teams and extending the principles of Agile management to other organizational areas of the company. In this sense, the objective of this study intends to explore the main challenges that leadership roles face in Agile environments, adopting a quantitative approach based on a questionnaire that was built and distributed for this purpose. For that, four research questions have been formulated:
RQ1: What are the main leadership competencies that should be expected in Agile environments?
RQ2: What are the main factors to increase productivity in Agile environments?
RQ3: What is the impact of demographic variables (i.e., gender and age) on the importance’s perception of leadership competencies?
RQ4: What is the impact of the number of years of experience in Agile on the importance’s perception of leadership competencies?
The paper is organized as follows: we initially perform a literature review on the Agile project management field by identifying the most predominant studies. After that initial phase, we present the structure of the adopted methodology. Then, the results of the study are analyzed and discussed. Finally, the conclusions of this work are drawn and some suggestions for future work are given.