Agile Leadership and Agile Management on Organizational Level - A Systematic Literature Review

Context: Organizations start understanding the need to become an agile organization in order to fully benefit from agility and be competitive on quickly changing markets. Leaders at every level, not just top managers, need to buy into agility as an organizational value. Since the mid 1990s, many software development teams have very successfully adopted agile methods and proved that they can deal with continuous change. However, it is not clear how agility looks like outside the software development department on the organizational level. Objectives: The aim of this work is to create a better understanding on what leadership and management can look like in the context of an agile organization. We focused our work on scientific papers to build a scientific overview as starting point for future research. Method: We conducted a systematic literature review to identify the existing scientific literature on leadership and management approaches in the context of agile on the organizational level. Results: We provide an overview of existing work on this topic. The analysis of the identified papers focused on the definition of and motivation for agile leadership and agile management. Conclusion: Practitioners can use the results for improvement, while researchers can build on the results to help companies with their agile transformation.