The impact of knowledge diversity on software project team's performance

Abstract

To cope with the rapid change of business environment, the knowledge asset has been considered as the most important resource in an organization to gain competitive advantages. How to manage knowledge assets effectively has become an important issue in knowledge economy era, and lots of knowledge management theories have been proposed. In this research, we focus on the impacts of knowledge diversity on team's performance and stability in a software development project.Knowledge diversity exhibits the degree of diverseness of knowledge composition in team members. It can stand for the index of diverse profession, experience, capability in a group. In the other, the software development project team's performance is measured by team's exhibition and stability. Based on environmental fitness and diversity-stability principle, knowledge diversity would have influences on team's performance. To study the research problems, we conducted a survey research by questionnaires and AMOS is applied to analyze the research model. The results show that knowledge diversity would help the team to cope with the environmental variation. It would also help to promote project's performance and sustain stability.