Team Flexibility Research Articles

Modeling team knowledge sharing and team flexibility: The role of within-team competition

This study examines the role of within-team competition (i.e. team hypercompetition and team development competition) in a team process. We developed and tested a model that associates team collectivism as the antecedent of within-team competition, and knowledge sharing and team flexibility as the outcomes. The model was empirically tested with data from 141 knowledge-intensive teams. The empirical findings showed that team collectivism had a positive relationship with team development competition and a negative relationship with team hypercompetition. Regarding the outcomes, team development competition and team hypercompetition had an indirect relationship with knowledge sharing and team flexibility through team empowerment. We offer a number of original contributions to the team effectiveness literature, especially by showing that team hypercompetition and team development competition have different impacts on team knowledge sharing and team flexibility.

Sharing Tacit Knowledge for Integrated Project Team Flexibility: Case Study of Integrated Project Delivery

The integrated project team has received wide attention and acceptance in the construction industry due to the adversarial nature of traditional contracting. With a growing trend toward the integration of all project parties, team flexibility emerges as an important factor to the success of more complex and dynamic construction projects. This research focuses on the flexibility of the integrated project team and explores its antecedents. Based on the literature that has found team flexibility is dependent on team dynamic capabilities, team dynamic capabilities was further studied and it was found that tacit knowledge sharing serves as a determinant of team flexibility at a deeper level. A case study was conducted on an integrated project delivery (IPD) project at its early stage. By using social network analysis, it was found that tacit knowledge sharing leads to the integrated project team flexibility through building connections between team members and increasing team dynamic capabilities. The primary contribution of this study is finding the linkage from tacit knowledge sharing to the integrated project team flexibility, which can provide a theoretical guide for the integrated project team to improve its ability to survive in the dynamic environment of construction projects.

The Role Of Flexibility On Software Development Performance: An Empirical Study On Software Development Teams

As both business and technological environments change at an increasing rate, flexibility has become a critical issue for project management in general and software development projects in particular. Even though previous research has examined the relationship between team flexibility and team performance, there still remains a gap in literature in respect to a software development project outputs. Accordingly in this paper, we examine the relationships among software team flexibility and software project outputs (market success, speed to market, and the functionality of the new software product) using survey data from 86 software development projects. The results reveal that the first dimension of software team flexibility, team autonomy, positively affected market success, speed to market, and software functionality, whereas the second dimension, team diversity, positively affected only speed to market and software functionality. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.

The Effects of Team Flexibility and Emotional Intelligence on Software Development Performance

As both business and technological environments change at an increasing rate, flexibility and emotional intelligence have become critical issues for project management. Even though previous research has examined the relationship between team flexibility and team performance and that between the emotional intelligence of teams and team outputs, there remains a gap in literature in respect to a holistic model. Accordingly in this paper, we examine the relationships among software team flexibility, emotional intelligence, and software project outputs (market success, speed to market, and the functionality of the new software product) using survey data from 86 software development projects. The results reveal positive a relationship between the diversity dimension of software project team flexibility and emotional intelligence. The first dimension of software team flexibility, team autonomy, positively affected market success, speed to market, and software functionality, whereas the second dimension, team diversity, positively affected only speed to market and software functionality. The emotional recognition of team members for both themselves and their teammates appears to be another important factor affecting the speed to market and functionality of the new software products. Managerial and theoretical implications of the study are discussed.

External social capital and information systems development team flexibility

Context ISD research based on the socio-technical perspective suggests that two sources of socio-technical change have a bearing on the performance of information systems development (ISD) projects: business requirements and development technology. To enhance project effectiveness, ISD teams need to enhance their flexibility in the face of the constant changes taking place from business and technical environments in which they operate. Flexibility is conceptualized as an outcome of capability development through constantly integrating and reconfiguring available resources within and outside of the organization where the team is embedded. Objective The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between a team’s external social capital and team flexibility. More specifically, based on social capital theory, this study argues that external social capital leads to IS team flexibility, which in turn contributes to the successful project performance. Method A survey design was selected to collect data and test the proposed model. A snowballing strategy was employed to collect data. 118 information systems developers participated in the survey and the model was analyzed using partial least squares regression. Results: The findings show that, in general, the ISD teams’ external social capital do contribute to the team’s response to changes. However, they exhibit unique impacts on ISD team flexibility respectively. Results The findings show that, in general, the ISD teams’ external social capital does contribute to the team’s response to changes. However, they exhibit unique impacts on ISD team flexibility respectively. Conclusion The various external social capitals have distinctive effects on a team’s flexibility. Specifically, horizontal relationships are positively associated with both business and technology flexibility. Vertical relationships are positively associated with business flexibility and market relationships technology flexibility. ISD managers should establish robust relationships with its high-ups, other lateral units, and third parties outside in the market. They also need to be more adaptive to the increasingly volatile socio-technical environment, and proactively search, exploit, upgrade, and integrate resources that are essential to the development of system development team flexibility.

Software development team flexibility antecedents

The ability to respond to changes in the environment during the development of software is crucial in achieving a quality product. Putting the project team together to achieve the ability to react effectively requires an understanding of the nature of flexibility and capabilities that might promote the ability to respond to changing requirements and conditions. Based on dynamic capability theory, we build a model of software quality that is dependent on the flexibility of the team, with the flexibility of the team dependent on reactive and anticipatory capabilities of the team members. A questionnaire administered to 119 software development team members indicates strong linkages from reactive capabilities and mixed results for anticipatory capabilities to team flexibility. Both flexibility components of a comprehensive response and efficient response to changes are critical in achieving quality software. The items comprising the capabilities can serve to guide management in building flexible development teams.

Occurrence and Effects of Leader Delegation in Virtual Software Teams

Virtual teams are an important work structure in software development projects. However, little is known about what constitutes effective virtual software team leadership, in particular, the amount of leader delegation that is appropriate in a virtual software-development environment. This study investigates virtual software team leader delegation and explores the impact of delegation strategies on virtual team performance mediated by team motivation, team flexibility and team satisfaction with the team leader. This research is a report of a pilot study run on student teams carried out to refine and test the research constructs and research model for a larger study run in corporations. The study found that virtual team leaders delegate more to competent virtual teams and that such delegation is positively correlated with team member satisfaction with their leader and with team member motivation. Overall, the work provides important information for software-based organizations interested in developing virtual team leadership skills.

Exploring the Determinants of Empowerment Climate in Indian Industry

The majority of research on empowerment has focused on the individual job incumbent's psychological experience of empowerment and link this with various work-related outcomes. Work context capable of promoting empowerment has been neglected by researchers. Extensive literature survey explored information sharing, autonomy through boundaries, team responsibility, reward system, workplace independence and flexibility and skill acquisition and development as work context (managerial structures and practices) and conceptualized as empowerment climate construct. Regression analysis indicated autonomy through boundaries has the greatest influence on empowerment, followed by team accountability, workplace independence and flexibility reward system, information sharing and then skill acquisition and development.

Team flexibility's relationship to staffing and performance in complex projects: An empirical analysis

We examine the role of flexibility in project team effectiveness. Specifically, we hypothesize that (1) it will mediate the relationship between staffing quality and effectiveness and (2) its relationship with team effectiveness will be moderated by project complexity, where more flexibility will be required when projects are complex. Hypotheses are tested using data collected from 60 cross-functional project teams. The results indicated that flexibility mediates the relationship between staffing quality and team performance (goal achievement and cohesion, but not project efficiency). Additionally, we find that two-dimensions of project complexity moderate the flexibility-performance relationship. Specifically, the more alternatives a team must consider, the stronger the negative relationship between flexibility and project efficiency is. The flexibility-cohesion relationship also was moderated, such that the relationship is more positive when the project is more ambiguous and more negative when the project team faces many alternatives. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

New product development in turbulent environments: Impact of improvisation and unlearning on new product performance

Team learning is vital for organizations in order to compete in fast-paced environments. However, the ways learning can be effective in such environments warrents research, especially for teams developing new products under rapidly changing technological and market conditions. Interestingly, recent new product development (NPD) literature demonstrates the essential role of improvisation (i.e., planning and executing any action simultaneously) and unlearning (i.e., changes in team beliefs and project routines) for effective learning and performing under turbulent conditions. However, the combined effect of team improvisation and unlearning on new product success (NPS) has largely been ignored. This paper investigates the nomological relations among team improvisation and unlearning, new product success, and environmental turbulence, and contributes to the literature on NPD team learning, and on team flexibility under turbulent conditions. By examining 197 new product-development projects, we found that (1) environmental turbulence positively affects team unlearning, (2) team unlearning concurrently stimulates team improvisation, (3) team improvisation positively impacts new product success by utilizing/implementing new knowledge acquired by unlearning and improvisation. We further discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our conclusions.

RELATIONSHIPS AMONG SOFTWARE TEAM FLEXIBILITY, AUTONOMY, DIVERSITY, AND PROJECT PERFORMANCE.

We tested relationships among two dimensions of software team flexibility (i.e., team response efficiency and team response extensiveness), team autonomy, team diversity, and project performance. W...

The ability of information systems development project teams to respond to business and technology changes: a study of flexibility measures

The socio-technical perspective suggests that information systems development projects (ISDPs) involve both organizational and technical dimensions. As both the organizational and technical aspects of ISDPs frequently change, the ISDP team's flexibility in responding to these changes has become a critical success factor for system development. While the importance of ISDP team flexibility has increased, the research literature lacks a consistent definition and validated measures of the construct. Drawing upon the socio-technical and the capability-based perspectives and using a systematic multi-stage approach, we identified major business and technology changes and developed measurement scales of ISDP team flexibility along two dimensions: Response Extensiveness and Response Efficiency. The results of a confirmatory factor analysis using survey data from 505 ISDP managers suggested that the final measurement scales exhibited adequate levels of measurement properties including unidimensionality, reliability, discriminant validity, factorial invariance and nomological validity. In addition, our results revealed an interesting negative relationship between Response Extensiveness and Response Efficiency, indicating a trade-off between the two dimensions of flexibility. Our result indicated that while the ISDP teams experienced and responded more extensively to business changes than technology changes, they were much less efficient in dealing with business changes than technology changes.