Motivating members’ involvement to effectually conduct collaborative software process tailoring

Abstract

Contemporary business and software environments are highly competitive and rapidly evolving, resulting in software projects that are highly customized and changeable during development. Therefore, software process tailoring (SPT) is important as software teams conduct SPT to adjust shared development processes and evolve the project to better meet unique and dynamic needs. SPT is a special type of teamwork in which members’ active participation and critical input are necessary for understanding and synthesizing various business and technical concerns that may be divergent and conflictual and then jointly identifying an integrated tailoring solution. In this context, this study examines members’ decisive and critical involvement in SPT and adopts a motivational perspective to explore how motivation can facilitate SPT performance. Specifically, we use empowerment theory to develop a model to theorize and examine how psychological empowerment (PE) in terms of meaningfulness, autonomy, potency, and impact motivates software teams to efficiently and effectively conduct SPT. The model also considers the power distance (PD) to understand how it functions in team-based critical thinking and decisional processes to energize team members’ participative effort. The investigation surveyed 102 software development teams and used partial least squares (PLS) to analyze the data. The results show that PE in terms of the four components has various influences on SPT performance and that PD has nonsignificant moderating effects. This study contributes to the software engineering literature by uncovering the contextual mechanism underlying the relationship between PE and PD in SPT. The limitations and possible extensions of this study are also outlined for future research.