Research Design Connections: Supporting Team Autonomy

by Sally Augustin, Ph.D. | March 28th, 2022

Ramasubu and Bardhan’s work does not directly discuss providing workers with control of their physical environments, but the team’s findings can be extended to doing so.  The researchers report that they “assess the causal impacts of adopting an organizational policy that grants higher levels of autonomy to project teams. . . . we posit that an organizational policy that provides higher levels of autonomy for software teams engenders performance-enhancing adaptations through agile reconfigurations of project operations. To test our hypothesis, we collaborated with a commercial firm and collected data from a policy experiment at the firm. We examined project-level data spanning a four-year observation period during which the firm implemented a new policy that significantly reduced the hurdles for project teams to autonomously reconfigure their operations. The results support our postulation . . . an organizational policy that provides greater autonomy to software teams for designing their context-specific project configurations …