When more holism is required—Agile teams and their persons

Abstract

This article for the journal Gruppe Interaktion Organisation (GIO) first highlights the theoretical discourse on the interplay between person and role and its significance for teamwork. Subsequently, personality traits that play a role in the development and collaboration in agile teams are discussed. The thesis here is that narcissistic personality traits make teamwork more difficult, but that these could be additionally induced in agile teams by the expectation of more (personal) involvement. Based on various studies on the topic, results of an explorative data analysis from an own research project on the performance of agile teams are presented, which show that a too strong focus on people has a negative impact on team performance.