The agile movement likes to date itself to a 2001 meeting and a one-page manifesto. That is a convenient origin story, but it hides an older and more useful one. Long before anyone wrote software in two-week sprints, organizations were experimenting with teams that set their own priorities, coordinated without a supervisor standing over them, and were held accountable for outcomes rather than hours. Agile did not invent the self-managing team. It rediscovered it, gave it a backlog, and forgot to mention the family resemblance.
That resemblance matters now because the two literatures, agile teams and self-managing teams, are finally being read side by side, and they keep arriving at the same conclusions about what makes autonomous groups work. When two independent research traditions converge, it is usually because they are describing the same underlying thing.
Two literatures, one mechanism
Start with the self-managing side. Magpili and Pazos (2018) reviewed the research on self-managing team performance and organized the factors that feed it into three nested levels: the individual, the team, and the organization. These inputs shape results not directly but through team processes and emergent states, the shared understanding and trust that build up as people work together. Their honest headline is that self-management is not an automatic upgrade. Despite decades of enthusiasm, the literature is inconsistent about whether these teams outperform, and the difference lies in whether the right inputs are present.
Now read the agile side against it. Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025), writing in a leading human resource management journal, reviewed how agile teams actually reach effectiveness and surfaced the same cast of enablers: autonomy, shared leadership, coordination, and emergent team states. Their framing is deliberate. They treat agile effectiveness as a question of people and organization, not of tooling, and they argue that it depends on the principles of self-management rather than on the ceremonies that decorate it.
Put the two reviews next to each other and the ceremony recedes into the background. Neither tradition finds that the standup or the retrospective is the engine. Both find that autonomy, distributed leadership and the quality of a team's internal states do the work. Agile, in other words, is a particular dialect of self-management that happened to grow up in software.
The convergence also cuts against the idea that agility is a software innovation the rest of the organization should copy wholesale. If the mechanism is self-management, then software teams were not the inventors. They were early adopters of a form that manufacturing cells, service crews and knowledge teams had been exploring under other names, and the burst of documentation agile produced simply made the form legible to a wider audience.
The individual the model depends on
There is a catch that both traditions share, and it is the one leaders least like to hear. Autonomy asks more of people, not less. Doblinger (2022) reviewed 84 studies on the competencies that self-managing team members need and built them into a model of knowledge, skills, abilities and other characteristics linking individual capability to team performance and to members' own wellbeing. The competencies that stand out are self-leadership, the ability to direct and motivate your own work without a manager doing it for you, and interpersonal skill, the ability to coordinate with peers who have no authority over you and over whom you have none.
This is the hidden bill that comes with the agile promise. Remove the supervisor and someone still has to do the supervising, which now means the team supervising itself. If members lack the competencies to do that, autonomy does not feel like freedom. It feels like being handed a problem with the instructions removed.
What the disguise costs
Seeing agile as self-management in a software costume changes what you fix when it fails. If you believe agile is a set of routines, you respond to a struggling team by tightening the routines: stricter standups, more detailed boards, a scaling framework layered on top. If you believe agile is self-management, you respond by asking whether the team actually has authority over its own priorities, whether leadership is genuinely shared or quietly hoarded by a lead, and whether the individuals have the self-leadership skills the model assumes.
This is precisely the terrain that the self-management tradition associated with Ricardo Semler has always insisted on, and it is why the current wave of interest in autonomous organizations should treat agile as an ally rather than a rival. They are the same argument in different clothes. The 2020s pressures that surround this, remote and hybrid teams, thinner management layers after successive layoffs, and workers who want control over how they do the job, all push in the direction the research already points.
The practical implication is to stop treating agile and self-management as separate initiatives competing for the same calendar. Magpili and Pazos (2018) tell you which inputs to get right across three levels. Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025) confirm that the same enablers drive agile effectiveness. Doblinger (2022) warns that none of it survives contact with people who were never equipped to lead themselves. The ceremonies were always the disguise. The autonomous, competent team was always the point.
Sources
- Magpili and Pazos (2018). Self-Managing Team Performance: A Systematic Review of Multilevel Input Factors. Organizes self-managing team inputs across individual, team and organization levels and finds performance gains are conditional, not automatic. https://doi.org/10.1177/1046496417710500
- Steegh, Van De Voorde and Paauwe (2025). Understanding how agile teams reach effectiveness: A systematic literature review to take stock and look forward. Reviews agile effectiveness through a people-and-organization lens and identifies autonomy, shared leadership, coordination and emergent states as the enablers. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.hrmr.2024.101056
- Doblinger (2022). Individual Competencies for Self-Managing Team Performance: A Systematic Literature Review. Reviews 84 studies to show autonomy improves performance only when members hold self-leadership and interpersonal competencies. https://doi.org/10.1177/10464964211041114