Academy of Management Journal · 2025
How can organizations keep agile teams autonomous when interdependencies continuously emerge between them?
Mahringer, C. A., & Danner-Schröder, A. (2025). Autonomous, yet interdependent: Designing interfaces across routine clusters. Academy of Management Journal, 68(6), 1300–1327. 10.5465/amj.2022.0853
Organizations increasingly organize work in autonomous or self-managing teams. Agile software development is a prominent example. Yet autonomy does not imply independence. As organizations scale agile teams, shared specialists, software code, technologies, release schedules, and other scarce resources can create cross-team dependencies that are difficult to anticipate before work begins.
The article examines what this tension means for organization design. It conceptualizes these cross-team dependencies as interdependencies between organizational routine clusters and investigates how they emerge while actors reorganize and perform their work. This shifts attention from designing interfaces in advance toward understanding how interface design continues as work unfolds.
We ask: How do interdependencies emerge during the reorganization of autonomous work units or routine clusters, and how does the process of designing interfaces to manage those interdependencies unfold?
To examine this process, we conducted a 12-month longitudinal ethnography of two agile software development teams in a medium-sized high-tech manufacturing company. The study combined sustained observation with 35 interviews, approximately 6,300 pages of documents, around 2,000 emails, and roughly 163,000 Jira actions. Following the reorganization over time allowed us to observe interdependencies as they became visible in ongoing work and to trace how actors responded by adapting resources, priorities, and schedules.
This paper examines the process of designing interfaces between routine clusters in a world in flux in which interdependencies are emergent. We reveal that designing interfaces is an endogenous and iterative process of creating and harmonizing interdependencies. In our ethnographic study of the reorganization of agile software development, actors implemented a second routine cluster, which they envisioned to work autonomously. Because the teams shared resources, however, they created interdependencies across the two routine clusters that challenged their autonomy. Our findings contribute to research on routine dynamics, interdependence, and organization design. They do so, first, by showing how the dynamics of designing interfaces are driven by the emergent nature of interdependencies, which routine participants may endogenously harmonize through routine performances. Second, our findings detail the practices through which “interface design work” is accomplished. Although some of these practices imply transitory variations in routine performances, others change the patterning of interfaces more sustainably. Third, resources play an important role in designing interfaces because making them readily available may require their reconfiguration. Moreover, the pooled interdependencies that flow from shared resources can escalate into more complex types of interdependence.
The study shows that organizational interfaces are continuously shaped as interdependencies become visible through ongoing work.
Interdependencies are not always given before organizational design begins. Replicating routines and sharing resources can create new dependencies as a reorganization unfolds. The people performing the work therefore become important designers of the interfaces between teams.
Sharing scarce people or artifacts can initially create pooled interdependence. Making those resources usable across teams can subsequently generate sequential interdependence. Under time pressure, sequential relationships can become reciprocal.
Actors harmonize emergent interdependencies by analyzing interdependencies, reconfiguring resources, mitigating interferences, and reconfiguring schedules. These practices work through artifacts or timing and can have transitory or more durable consequences.
The study extends research on organization design and interdependence by showing why interfaces cannot always be fully specified before work begins. When interdependencies emerge through action, interface design becomes an ongoing accomplishment embedded in everyday organizing.
It also adds a temporal perspective to classic interdependence theory. Pooled, sequential, and reciprocal interdependencies can develop into one another as actors reorganize resources and coordinate work over time.
The findings are particularly relevant when organizations scale agile teams. Cross-team dependencies can arise because teams share specialists, software code, technologies, or release schedules. These dependencies may only become visible after teams have started working.
Managers and team members should therefore treat team interfaces as objects of continuing design rather than as one-time structural decisions. The study points to four concrete forms of interface design work: identifying dependencies, adapting shared resources, reprioritizing interfering work, and adjusting schedules as dependencies change.
