Skip to content
Phil Diegmann
Research

Project Management Journal 52(1), 11–30 · 2021

Investigating the "Socio" in Socio-Technical Development: The Case for Psychological Safety in Agile Information Systems Development

Hennel, P., Rosenkranz, C.

Paper

Psychological safety matters for multidisciplinary agile teams, so that problems surface early.

My role: first and corresponding author. Designed the study, collected and analysed the qualitative data, wrote the manuscript. Central contribution of my dissertation.

Study

A qualitative multiple-case study of psychological safety in agile software teams: three case studies in two large insurance companies and one software company. Social agile practices positively influence psychological safety, transparency, communication and ultimately productivity.

The article is the central contribution of my 2021 dissertation, available open access at kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/53217.

Why it matters in practice

Agile teams depend on people raising problems early. Where that is unsafe, coordination problems stay hidden until they become expensive. The findings point to concrete routines for feedback and conflict that team leads can design deliberately.