The Relationship between the Scrum Method and Employee Satisfaction

Abstract

The Scrum method has an important place among agile software development methods, and its use worldwide has increased over the years. This study aims to measure the impact of the Scrum method on business processes and examine its relationship with employee satisfaction. Specifically, a common survey was applied to both the development team and stakeholders working with the Scrum method. Since separate studies are generally conducted for the development team or stakeholders, evaluating employees in both roles in a single research constitutes a distinctive element of the study. An in-depth examination of the effects of Scrum and its relationship with employee satisfaction will significantly contribute to the literature. Within the scope of the research, a survey was administered to the employees of a bank. In the survey, following the demographic questions, the participants were asked questions about Scrum method applications and their perspectives on the method, and then other questions were included to understand their satisfaction levels. 108 people participated in the survey, and the answers were analyzed using SPSS. Since the data did not show a parametric distribution due to the survey, the answers were analyzed using Spearman Correlation Analysis, Mann Whitney U, and Kruskal Wallis test. As a result, it has been seen that the factors that increase the satisfaction between IT teams and stakeholders the most are related to the alignment and team solidarity between the teams. In addition, it has been observed that regardless of the roles of the people in the team, seeing their work as meaningful has a significant positive impact on satisfaction. Finally, there was rarely a notable difference between demographic elements and stress and satisfaction variables, and a significant difference was only seen between the number of people in the team and stress. © 2024 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.