How hard do people work in an Agile environment?

I have been thinking about some of the basic premises of Agile lately. One of them seems to be that people will work hard if they are empowered to do so, and that you don't need people to monitor anyone's work/boss anyone around under an Agile aegis - people will pick up work on their own.

However, this assumption goes completely against another basic tenet of many people when it comes to work; people are lazy and will do as little as possible to get by.

Now that I'm smack in the middle of it, the question is: which is true?

Well, oddly, what I'm seeing is a mixture. For the developers, apparently the scuttlebutt is that they feel they're now working harder than they ever have before! There's a great pressure to make sure that at the daily standup they're able to show that they've accomplished something and that they can "move a card" from the In Progress to the Ready to Review column, or from the Review to the Done column. I'm not sure how this is different from before. Perhaps it is the small scale of the tasks that they are needing to do that makes this possible - or maybe it's because they're actually being monitored on a daily basis! (Which would support the lazy theory, I think.)

But for the people who's roles have been poorly defined - or for the people on teams where the work to be done has more generally been poorly defined, or incorrectly scoped (and finished halfway through our month-long sprints), I've instead been seeing a kind of lethargy and unwillingness to find work. I think to some extent this is indicative of some morale problems at this point in the game - but I also think that what we're seeing is a complete lack of clarity about how things are supposed to be done right now. We're not all jumping into each other's roles, because we can't, we're not cross-trained appropriately; we don't know how it is we're supposed to do the work we probably should be doing on planning; and because this work wasn't done beforehand, the people who normally execute the planned work are adrift. Many of us are way out of our comfort zones, and we're not all turning into radical go-getters just because there's a vaccuum of power and control, and we're "supposed" to do everything now. I see the scrum masters not providing guidance, and I see the other team members wasting their hours away waiting for something to happen. Is the business owner's highest priority work happening? I think not.

I wonder sometimes if Agile is created under a certain kind of American optimism about the workplace. Me, I have been seeing a lot of struggling people - but I'm amused to see that the QA team, the one that was consistently worked into the ground before the transition, is actually getting more time to breathe these days, whereas the developers, around whom this process seems to revolve, are the ones who find themselves struggling under the painful searchlight of constant attention.