Antecedents of coordination effectiveness of software developer dyads from interacting teams

: an empirical investigation

Abstract

The software industry is booming and the importance of software in global contexts is magnified. Unfortunately, software development failure rates remain an infamous topic. There are numerous reasons for software project failure. Among them, coordination failure is considered as especially salient. Studies on coordination in software development have been conducted by a number of researchers from different perspectives. However, these studies are confined to team internal coordination. Some studies involve projects that include multiple teams but they do not explicitly differentiate team internal and external coordination processes. The relationship between team-internal and team-external cooperative processes remains quite ambiguous. Motivated by such concerns, this study proposes a research model to explain the antecedents of coordination effectiveness of software developer dyads from interacting teams. This model explores the antecedents by integrating inter-personal coordination and technology-based coordination. Inter-personal coordination is examined from a social capital theory perspective. A survey was conducted to test the research model. To avoid the drawbacks of getting information from only one side of a relationship, a dyadic perspective was adopted. Data were collected from 59 software developer dyads from different interacting teams as well as software developers’ managers. After aggregating data from individual level to dyadic level, this study employs Partial Least Squares (PLS) to test this model using dyads as the unit of analysis. The results reveal that implicit knowledge sharing has a significant positive impact on coordination effectiveness. Explicit knowledge sharing and coordination technology use have no statistically significant impacts on coordination effectiveness. However the teams were working predominantly in a collocated mode. Social capital (mutual trust and project commitment) has a significant impact on knowledge sharing with mutual trust directly affecting both implicit and explicit knowledge sharing. Project commitment also has a direct impact on explicit knowledge sharing and mutual trust, but it does not directly affect implicit knowledge sharing. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed. Limitations of this study are identified. Future research directions are also explored.

Date of Award	3 Oct 2006
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Douglas VOGEL (Supervisor)