This is the last in the list of agile limitations:

1. A team of stars
2. Fit with organizational culture
3. Small team
4. Collocated team
5. Where's my methodology?
6. Team ownership vs. individual accountability

Agile development stresses the importance of team ownership in order to improve teamwork and therefore overall results. Team ownership is a very appealing concept, but how can we implement it since an organization's performance-reward system assesses individual performance and rewards individuals, not teams?

If we rely exclusively on individual accountability, we tend to generate selfish behavior that can affect teamwork. If we rely exclusively on team assessment, we overlook that individuals perform differently in a given team, creating opportunities for underperforming team members to get away with it and lessening incentives to perform in a superior way. Obviously we have to find a way to take both these perspectives into account.

Actually this problem can be solved elegantly by defining two levels of performance-reward:

• Team level: The team is perceived as a single entity from management's point of view. Management assesses teams' performance and allocates rewards to teams in the form of points.
• Individual level: Team leaders (or whatever the title is) evaluate teams members rewarding them with points.

In order to have a short feedback loop, assessment should be done frequently (every month for example) using a lightweight system incurring very little administrative overhead.

The final performance of an individual is calculated using both team and individual scores. For example, team A has been given a score of 7 out of 10 by management. John, who is a member of team A, has received an evaluation of 8 out of 10 from his team leader. John's final score might be an addition (15 out of 20) or a multiplication (56%) of these two scores, for example. In the end, the manager is responsible to reward John based on his final score. (See this post for details on the performance-reward system)

Thanks to this kind of system, we encourage teamwork but we still take individual contribution into account, effectively reaching a balance between team ownership and individual accountability.