Transformational leadership not enough to achieve high DevOps outcomes - report

Transformative leadership does drive high IT performance - but is not enough, by itself, to achieve DevOps outcomes

Organisations can't rely on transformational leaders alone in order to achieve high DevOps outcomes, according to the 2017 State of DevOps report.

The annual report, put together by open-source software vendor Puppet and DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), embodies the views of IT professionals, developers and executives. This year, 3,200 people took part in the survey, and a key focus area was on the leadership characteristics needed to drive high performance.

The organisation used a measure of transformational leadership noted in Rafferty and Griffin's 2004 book, ‘Dimensions of Transformational Leadership'. This involved five key areas:

• Vision. A clear concept of where the organisation is going and where it should be in five years;
• Inspirational communication. Communicates in a way that inspires and motivates, even in an uncertain or changing environment;
• Intellectual stimulation. Challenges followers to think about problems in new ways;
• Supportive leadership. Demonstrates care and consideration of followers' personal needs and feelings;
• Personal recognition. Praises and acknowledges achievement of goals and improvements in work quality; personally compliments others when they do outstanding work.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the characteristics of transformational leadership were highly correlated with IT performance.

"We observed significant differences in leadership between high, medium and low performing IT teams," the report read.

High performing teams reported having leaders with the strongest behaviours across all five areas, and low performing teams reported the lowest levels of these leadership characteristics.

The survey found that teams with the least transformative leaders - the bottom third - were also far less likely to be high IT performers. In fact, they were half as likely to exhibit high IT performance.

However, while transformational leadership is a core component of successful IT performance, Puppet and DORA found evidence that the presence of leaders with transformational characteristics is not enough to achieve high DevOps outcomes.

Of the teams that reported how well their leaders exemplified transformational leadership characteristics, the researchers focused on those teams whose leaders were in the top 10 per cent.

They thought that these teams, as a group, would be the very highest performers - but this was not the case, there was a variation in performance level.

"This told us that transformational leadership behaviour is not enough, by itself, to drive high IT performance," the report states.

"Leaders cannot achieve DevOps outcomes on their own. DevOps success also depends on a suitable architecture, good technical practices, use of lean management principles, and all the other factors we've studied over the years," it adds

The researchers said that they found that good leaders helped to build great teams, great technology and great organisations indirectly.

It said that transformation leadership provided the foundation for a culture in which continuous experimentation and learning is part of everybody's daily work.

"The behaviour of transformational leaders thus enhances and enables the values, processes and practices that our research has identified. Transformational leadership is not a separate behaviour or a new set of practices; instead, it amplifies the effectiveness of the technical and organisational practices we have been studying over several years," the report concluded.