| Course | MGT 571 Staffing, Leading and Controlling for Agile Environments (MGT/571) |
|---|---|
| Week | 3 |
| Paper type | Team leadership and change analysis |
| Length | about 1,200 words, 4 double-spaced pages plus title page and references |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | University of Phoenix |
| Program | MBA |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for MGT 571 Week 3
From Approving Every Step to Clearing the Path: Leading Agile Teams Through Change at Tippecanoe Orthopedic Systems
[Student Name]
University of Phoenix
MGT/571: Staffing, Leading and Controlling for Agile Environments
Week 3 Assignment
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
Tippecanoe Orthopedic Systems and all people and events are composites written for a model paper.
Two months ago, the composite implant maker Tippecanoe launched three agile teams: one for surgical planning software and two for surgical instruments. The software team has delivered two working increments and surgeons have praised early prototypes. The instrument teams have missed their sprint goals four times. Team members say they wait days for department heads to approve design choices, and product owners assign tasks to individuals rather than letting teams plan. An agile team cannot be faster than the slowest approval it must wait for, and in most organizations the slowest approvals come from leaders who have not changed how they lead. This paper analyzes leadership in Tippecanoe's agile teams.
Diagnosing the Difference
Interviews and observation of sprint meetings revealed differences. The software team's manager, who had worked in agile settings before, stopped attending daily meetings, set clear goals with the product owner and spent her time removing obstacles, such as slow access to test equipment. The instrument teams' department heads still review every drawing and expect status reports. One product owner assigns tasks each morning.
Research on Team Leadership
Burke et al. (2006) pooled results across many team studies and reported that both task-focused leadership behaviors, such as structuring work and clarifying roles, and person-focused behaviors, such as empowerment and consideration, were related to team effectiveness, with empowerment especially linked to team learning. Agile leadership requires both: clear goals and boundaries along with the freedom for teams to decide how to meet them.
Psychological Safety
Edmondson (1999) showed that where teammates trust that candor will not be punished, they seek help, discuss errors and test ideas more often, and those habits go along with stronger results. Instrument team members said they hesitate to raise design problems in sprint reviews when department heads attend, fearing criticism. Low psychological safety slows the feedback agile work depends on.
Self-Managing Teams
Lee and Edmondson (2017) described self-managing organizations as those that radically decentralize authority, and noted that such arrangements require clear rules about who decides what, or confusion and hidden hierarchy fill the gap. Tippecanoe's teams are told they are self-managing but have no clear decision rights, so old hierarchies persist.
A Decision Rights Chart
To end the confusion, the steering group drafted a decision rights chart. Teams decide how to design within approved requirements, which tasks to take on and how to test. Product owners decide the order of work and accept completed features. Department heads decide engineering standards and staffing. Quality and regulatory leads decide whether design control documentation meets requirements at defined milestones. Executives decide funding and product strategy. The chart is posted in each team area and reviewed after each quarter.
Why the Software Team Succeeded
The software team's success was not luck. Its manager had led agile teams before, its product owner had worked with surgeons for years and its members had chosen to join. It also faced fewer physical testing constraints. The instrument teams can learn from its practices, but leaders should not expect identical results immediately, since physical prototypes take longer than software builds.
Redefining Functional Managers
Department heads will move from approving work to building capability. They will set engineering standards, develop their specialists, staff teams and advise when asked. Design decisions within approved requirements will belong to the team, with department heads reviewing at defined design control milestones rather than at every step.
Redefining Product Owners
Product owners will set priorities for what the team builds and accept completed work, but teams will decide how to do the work and who takes which tasks. Product owners will be coached to stop assigning tasks and to focus on surgeon needs and the backlog.
The Team Facilitator Role
Each team's facilitator will protect the team's process, run retrospectives and escalate obstacles. Facilitators will report recurring obstacles, such as approval delays, to the agile steering group.
Leaders' Own Transition
Department heads built careers on technical authority, and giving up approval feels like losing status. They need a new source of recognition: their performance reviews will measure the capability and growth of their engineers and the flow of work through teams, not the number of decisions they make.
Managing Resistance
Some resistance reflects real concerns: department heads worry that design quality will slip without their review. The response is to include quality checks in the team's definition of done and design reviews at milestones, so quality is protected without daily approvals. Addressing the concern removes much of the resistance.
The Role of Quality and Regulatory Leaders
Quality and regulatory leaders hold real authority in a device company, and their behavior shapes whether teams can move quickly. In the software team, the regulatory specialist joins sprint planning and flags documentation needs early, so nothing surprises the team at a milestone. In the instrument teams, quality reviews still happen at the end of each month, creating queues. Asking quality and regulatory leaders to embed their specialists in teams, and to coach rather than gatekeep, extends the leadership shift beyond engineering.
Coaching and Development
An experienced agile coach will work with leaders and teams for six months. Department heads and product owners will attend workshops on coaching skills and agile leadership, and leaders will meet monthly to share what is working.
Handling Conflict Inside Teams
Self-managing teams still face disagreements, such as between a mechanical engineer and a manufacturing engineer about whether a design can be produced at reasonable cost. Teams will use retrospectives to raise such issues and the facilitator to mediate. When a team cannot agree within a sprint, the product owner decides on priority questions and the relevant department head advises on technical ones. Clear escalation keeps conflicts from stalling work.
Leading by Example
Senior executives will attend sprint reviews as observers, ask questions about learning rather than status and visibly accept that early increments are incomplete. Employees watch what senior leaders reward.
Indicators of Healthy Leadership
Indicators include the share of design decisions made within teams, measured from the decision log each team keeps, average approval wait time, sprint goal completion, team psychological safety scores from a short quarterly survey and the number of obstacles escalated and resolved.
Recognition That Fits Agile Work
Recognition practices also need to change. Tippecanoe has traditionally recognized individual engineers for patents and project completions. Agile work depends on team results and on people who help others, such as a tester who catches problems early or a developer who pairs with a newcomer. Leaders will recognize teams at sprint reviews and invite teammates to nominate colleagues who helped them, reinforcing the collaborative behavior agile teams need.
Expected Results
If approval delays fall from days to hours and teams plan their own work, the instrument teams should meet most sprint goals within three months, as the software team does now.
Conclusion
Tippecanoe's struggling agile teams are not failing because of their members but because leaders still lead as before. Redefining the roles of department heads and product owners, building psychological safety, clarifying decision rights and supporting leaders through their own transition will let teams manage their work, with indicators that track whether leadership has really changed.
References
Burke, C. S., Stagl, K. C., Klein, C., Goodwin, G. F., Salas, E., & Halpin, S. M. (2006). What type of leadership behaviors are functional in teams? A meta-analysis. The Leadership Quarterly, 17(3), 288-307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2006.02.007
Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350-383. https://doi.org/10.2307/2666999
Lee, M. Y., & Edmondson, A. C. (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Research in Organizational Behavior, 37, 35-58. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.riob.2017.10.002
What the MGT 571 Week 3 instructions ask
The third MGT 571 assignment typically asks graduate students to analyze how leaders can guide teams through organizational change, often in agile settings. Common requirements include leadership theories relevant to teams and change, the shift from command-and-control to empowering leadership, psychological safety, managing resistance, the roles of different leaders, development needs and indicators of success. Some prompts ask for analysis of a specific team. Apply research to observed behaviors, recommend concrete leadership practices, address leaders' own transition and back each point with APA-formatted sources. When you have observed a team, describe specific meetings or decisions rather than general impressions, and explain how you would know if leadership had changed.
How this MGT 571 Week 3 example is built
Two months into agile work, one Tippecanoe team is thriving while two are stuck, and the paper traces the difference to leadership. In the struggling teams, department heads still approve every design decision and product owners act like project managers giving orders. Research shows that both task-focused and person-focused leadership behaviors matter in teams and that psychological safety supports learning. Self-managing structures work when authority is clearly redistributed. The paper redefines functional managers as coaches and capability builders, gives product owners authority over priorities, writes a decision rights chart and plans coaching for leaders, with indicators such as decisions made within teams and approval wait times.
MGT 571 Week 3 grading rubric: where the points go
Strong team leadership papers connect research to specific behaviors and recommend changes leaders can make. Faculty credit accurate use of team leadership research, attention to psychological safety, a clear account of how authority shifts in agile settings and recognition that leaders themselves must change and need support. Diagnosing real problems before recommending solutions shows analytical skill, and tying each recommendation to a specific observed problem makes the paper persuasive. Indicators that track leadership behavior, not just team output, demonstrate understanding. Clear organization and APA citations complete the work. Strong papers also compare teams or periods, as when one team thrives and another struggles under the same method, because the comparison isolates leadership as the variable that differs. Recognizing that senior executives send signals through what they ask in reviews adds a useful layer to the analysis.
MGT 571 Week 3 help: mistakes to avoid
Students often recommend that leaders be more supportive without saying what that means. Describe specific behaviors. Another frequent gap is ignoring middle managers, whose roles change most in agile transformations. Address their transition. Students also assume self-managing teams need no leadership. Explain what leadership looks like when authority is shared. Avoid blaming team members for resistance that leadership behavior causes. Diagnose first. Include support for leaders, such as coaching. Finally, measure leadership behavior directly, since team outputs lag behind changes in how teams are led. Short, frequent team surveys and counts of decisions made inside the team are practical starting points.
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- MGT 571 Week 4: Legal and Ethical Considerations
- MGT 571 Week 5: Controls and Agile Metrics
- MGT 571 Week 6: Strategic Execution
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MGT 571 Week 3 questions, answered
What does MGT 571 Week 3 usually cover?
It usually covers leading teams through change: team leadership research, empowering leadership, psychological safety, self-management, resistance, leaders' changing roles and development.
Where can I find a free MGT 571 Week 3 sample paper?
A complete analysis of leadership in a medical device company's new agile teams, with notes, is presented on this page. MBA students can ask for a no-cost first version tailored to their prompt.
What leadership behaviors help teams most?
Research finds that both task-focused behaviors, such as clarifying goals and structure, and person-focused behaviors, such as empowerment and support, are related to team effectiveness.
What is the role of a manager in agile teams?
Managers in agile settings typically shift from assigning and approving work to developing people, removing obstacles, building capabilities and setting context, while teams decide how to do the work.
Why does psychological safety matter in agile teams?
Agile work depends on frequent feedback, admitting problems early and experimenting, which people do only if they believe they will not be punished or embarrassed for speaking up.
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