Value of bottom-up team formation for complex adaptive business systems

Workplace teams in software service organizations need to be adaptive to address the needs of complex business systems. Typically teams are formed top-down and go through stages - storm, form and norm before they perform. As knowledge societies move from ‘command and control’ mode to that of ‘connect and communicate’, building effective teams is a formidable challenge that needs great focus and attention. Several scholars in the fields of psychology and organizational behavior have acknowledged the role of Shared Mental Models in team learning and effectiveness. We used Shared Mental Model construct to study the relevance and contribution of bottom-up self-organization to agile software development teams. We found that self-organization develops task and team related shared mental models. Task related shared mental model fostered characteristics that are crucial to agile software development teams and team related shared mental models facilitated members to carry out roles needed for the functioning of agile software development teams.