Can only managers enact formal control? The role of team-managed formal control in agile project success

Although formal control in teams is often conceptualized as manager-imposed, recent literature suggests that teams can enact formal control themselves through codified, mandatory, and repeatable practices. We argue that agile practices such as iterative delivery, retrospective review, and automated testing function as team-managed formal controls (TMFC), distinct from traditional managerial controls. Drawing on configurational control theory and the enabling versus authoritative control lens, we examine behavioral (BC), output (OC), and emergent outcome control (EOC) alongside TMFC and test their associations with agile project success. Using multilevel modeling with 344 respondents across 57 agile teams, we find that enabling controls (EOC, TMFC) are positively associated with perceived solution impacts and TMFC is consistently associated with perceived solution quality. Output control is positively associated with solution impacts but not quality, and behavioral control shows no positive associations with either outcome. We also find a negative interaction between TMFC and BC: When both are strongly present, the positive association between team-managed practices and outcomes is effectively zero, suggesting these control logics conflict when co-enacted. Decomposing TMFC reveals that iterative delivery drives the positive main effect, whereas automated testing is the primary locus of conflict with BC. Team-level, project-level, and subscale-level analyses confirm these findings. Our findings extend configurational control theory by introducing TMFC as a distinct enabling mechanism, revealing the differential roles of specific practices, and identifying a conflict between team-managed and behavioral control not observed with output or emergent outcome control.