Influence of cultural dimensions on Agile team behavioral characteristics

Abstract: Context: Agile methodologies are widely recognized in western countries. From past few years, its practices are being successfully adopted in global settings especially in eastern countries. Across the world, teams are following its values and principles. Are all the teams behaving in the same way? Potential difficulties related to culture arise while implementing agile practices. Due to variance in backgrounds and behaviors, social cliques and issues are likely to be formed between the team mates which become a hurdle. Objectives: The study unravels the list of relationships between the agile team behavioral characteristics and Hofstede cultural dimensions. It also explores whether Indian employees working in an agile environment possess the required behavioral characteristics which are useful for the effective functioning of a team. The other objective of this study reveals the influence of the years of experience of the agile employees on behavioral characteristics. Methods: Data collection processes include a literature review and a web survey. First, in the literature review analysis of the empirical studies from year 1999-2011 was done. The review approach helped in collecting and summarizing the data. The studies were identified from the most reliable and authentic databases that are scientifically and technically peer reviewed such as Engineering village, IEEE Xplore, ACM digital library, Springer Link and Google Scholar. A survey was conducted with 33 practitioners from various multinational organizations in India. Statistical analysis was used to analyze the data. Results: Hofstede’s cultural dimensions had noticeable influence on agile team behavioral characteristics. Although, all the enabler characteristics were not seen in Indian culture, the results clearly show that some of the cultural dimensions are enabling factors to function well in an agile team and some hinder the team effectiveness. The result from the literature review shows the list of relationships between Hofstede cultural dimensions and agile team behavioral characteristics. All team behavioral characteristics were to a certain extent demonstrated by Indian agile employees, which can be known from the survey results. It is also seen from the survey results that, team behavioral characteristics can be demonstrated more effectively by the experienced agile employees. Conclusion: From this study, we have found the relationships between Hofstede cultural dimensions and agile team behavioral characteristics. List of agile team behavioral characteristics which were followed by Indian agile employees were obtained from the survey. We conclude that Indian agile employees were able to demonstrate all the agile team behavior characteristics required for an effective functioning of a team. One more interesting thing which came into our attention, after analyzing the survey was that years of experience of agile employees do have an effect on the employees which influences the demonstration of team behavior characteristics. It was clear that demonstration of these characteristics were not only dependent on individual’s nature but also on the years of experience in agile environment. The absence of relationships which were not found through literature needs to be focused. Hence we conclude that there is a need for conducting even more in-depth surveys and reviews to investigate the unfound relationships.