Digital Natives in Agile Organisations: An Exploratory Study in New Zealand

Abstract

The predominance of agile ways of working and the influx of digital natives to the workforce are two phenomena that have begun to reshape organisations over recent years. Digital technologies are also disrupting organisations and changing the conduct of business. Volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) are conditions that summarise the challenges that business entities currently face. Agile – a set of values and principles founded in 2001 – is known today to be a mindset that can help organisations to compete in the 21st century. With its roots in software development, many businesses are leveraging agile values and principles to compete and deliver value to the end-user. Agile places strong emphasis on putting the customer at the heart of an organisation to deliver value incrementally, at a sustainable pace. To achieve this, self-organising, autonomous teams of individuals are a necessity. Additionally, to successfully transition to agile, strong support from senior leaders is required to mitigate against siloed thinking and to shift organisational cultures. Digital natives are defined as individuals who grew up with many of these disruptive digital technologies as part of their lives from birth. Many researchers have evaluated digital natives and have identified characteristics that are unique to them. Their counterparts, digital immigrants, have adapted to digital technologies, but to some degree retain their ‘accent’. The effect of digital natives in the workplace is a question that has been raised by many researchers in past studies; this study attempts to address part of this question. The qualitative and quantitative research undertaken in this thesis focuses on New Zealand agile organisations. It assesses whether they are meeting the expectations of digital natives (in contrast to digital immigrants), and whether the leadership style adopted in these agile organisations is preferred by them. The research used an online anonymous questionnaire and semi-structured interviews to collate data. Hermeneutics and coding were used to make sense of the data and draw conclusions.