Definition of sequential interdependence12/6/2023 2011), influences the team’s coordination pattern (Orton and Weick 1990). Task interdependence, which refers to the degree to which team members depend on one another to carry out work effectively (Rico et al. 2018 Van der Vegt and Van de Vliert 2002). They rely on each other being good at sharing materials, information, or expertise, to achieve the desired output or performance (Stray et al. While being highly self-managing, distributed agile team members are also highly interdependent. In the current study, we investigate how different types of task interdependence in distributed teams affect their performance. For distributed teams to work in an agile manner, this often require high levels of collective self-managing behaviors, such as “managing their own workload, shifting work among themselves based on need and best of it, and participating in team decision making” (Highsmith 2004). This allows individual team members to be flexible in solving their work tasks, yet at the same time, team members may be highly interdependent in coordinating and completing the team’s focal goals (Hertel et al. It is increasingly common for organizations to organize in distributed agile teams, in which team members are geographically distributed and coordinate through computer-mediated communication tools to perform their work (Gilson, 2015). Rapid technological innovations, new forms of work arrangements, and organizational disruptions have prompted the need to re-examine underlying assumptions of job and team design that may no longer hold true (Langfred and Rockmann 2016 Oldham and Hackman 2010). Thus, we argue that each type of task interdependence contributes in a unique way to team performance in distributed agile teams. ![]() ![]() Specifically, we show that high initiated task interdependence is associated with higher role clarity of others, while received task interdependence is associated with higher role clarity of self, and that both subsequently result in higher team performance in distributed agile teams. Survey results from 191 participants working in distributed agile teams within three companies in Norway confirm our hypotheses. Given that task coordination is particularly challenging when team members are not co-located, the present study investigates the roles of the two types of task interdependence, i.e., initiated versus received task interdependence. However, research findings about the performance of such teams appear to be inconsistent, calling for more research to investigate the conditions under which distributed agile teams may thrive. Distributed agile teams are increasingly employed in organizations, partly due to the increased focus on digital transformation.
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