Team wisdom in software development projects and its impact on project performance

Abstract

While the concept of wisdom, which refers to how people make right use of their knowledge through their practical actions, judgments, and ethical decisions, in general attracts researcher interest in a variety of disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology and management studies, little is known about how wisdom is conceptualized and then operationalized in the software development project team context. Based on the frameworks for philosophical, group and organizational wisdom, this paper identifies software development project team wisdom as a process for how team members best use the stock and flow of their knowledge through collective judgment, virtue-ethics, emotions/feelings, and effective decision-making during their project-related efforts. Adapting the efforts and functional similarities of both group and organizational wisdom practices, this effort determines that wisdom-related mechanisms (e.g., team diversity, networking with other teams and people, and their past experiences), joint epistemic actions (e.g., team reasoning, intuition, and aesthetic capacity), and team virtue and prudence become the different faces of the software development team wisdom process. We then propose how these different faces interrelate and how they also relate to project process effectiveness, such as team learning and speed-to-users, both of which have been rarely addressed empirically in the context of software development project teamwork.By examining 210 in-house software development project teams in a field study and using structural equation modeling analysis, our results empirically show the following: (a) software development wisdom-related mechanisms positively relate to software development team prudence and virtue and their joint epistemic actions, (b) software development team prudence and virtue are positively associated with software development team joint epistemic actions, and further (d) software development team joint epistemic actions are positively associated with software development project process effectiveness. We conclude by discussing our findings as they relate to the wisdom framework of software development project teams and suggest the key managerial implications for different types of software development projects.