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Abstract
One prominent approach in the exploration of the variations in project team performance has been to study two components of the aggregate personalities of the team members: conscientiousness and agreeableness. A second line of research, known as self-categorisation theory, argues that identifying as team members and the team's performance norms should substantially influence the team's performance. This paper explores the influence of both these perspectives in university software engineering project teams. Eighty students worked to complete a piece of software in small project teams during 2007 or 2008. To reduce limitations in statistical analysis, Monte Carlo simulation techniques were employed to extrapolate from the results of the original sample to a larger simulated sample (2043 cases, within 319 teams). The results emphasise the importance of taking into account personality (particularly conscientiousness), and both team identification and the team's norm of performance, in order to cultivate higher levels of performance in student software engineering project teams.
Funding
This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [Project ID: 0663314].
Additional information
Conal Monaghan finished his undergraduate studies in 2011 and is currently undertaking a PhD in clinical psychology at the Australian National University, Australia. His research interests are related to psychological perspectives on group performance, group membership's effect on behaviour, the public's attitudes towards biotechnology, and how an individual's Machiavellian disposition affects their development and psychopathology.
Boris Bizumic, PhD, is lecturing social and personality psychology at the Australian National University, Australia. His research interests have focused on understanding the relationships between group and individual factors. His work has been published in international journals, including the European Journal of Social Psychology, Political Psychology and Applied Psychology: An International Review.
Kate Reynolds is an expert on group processes and intergroup relations (prejudice and stereotyping, social change, leadership and power). Specifically, she investigates the way in which people's group memberships (others similar to ‘us’) affect the functioning of the mind (cognition) and attitudes and behaviour. Her work with various students and colleagues is of interest to a range of policy-makers in areas such as educational leadership and school improvement, social norm change in dysfunctional communities, and building social cohesion in the face of ethnic and religious diversity.
Michael Smithson is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Australian National University. He is the author of 5 books, co-editor of 2, and author of more than 140 refereed journal articles and book chapters. His primary research interests are decision-making under uncertainty and statistical methods.
Lynette Johns-Boast is a Lecturer in Software Engineering at the Australian National University. Her research interests include learning object repositories and re-usable learning objects, professional education and transfer of knowledge into the workplace, the human aspects of software engineering, including personality and its impact on teams, and women in engineering. She is an active member of the Australasian Association for Engineering Education. She is also a member of Engineers Australia and the IEEE.
Dirk van Rooy is a Lecturer at the Australian National University at the School of Psychology. His research is focused on computational models of social behaviour, including connectionist and multi-agent models. In general, he aims to build theories and models of social cognition that are attentive to the cognitive, social and biological underpinnings of behaviour.