Leadership and Performance of the Software Development Team: Influence of the Type of Project Management.
| Autor | Garcia, Fernando Andre Zemuner |
I Introduction
Despite the existence of guides to good practice and established methodologies, many projects still show a high degree of failure (Lalonde, Bourgault, & Findeli, 2012). According to Papadopoulos (2015), traditional software development methods are inflexible and fail to respond to consumer and business needs, and other methods, such as agile, provide a set of practices that enable rapid adaptations to the needs of modern product development.
A few articles, such as Papadopoulos (2015) and Ben Mahmoud-Jouini et al. (2016), have evaluated organizations that adopt more than one methodology for the development of their products and services. However, these articles did not compare traditional and nontraditional methodologies to verify the differences and similarities in the results. Serrador and Pinto (2015) demonstrated a weak superiority of the agile method over traditional methods in project success.
A few articles, such as Papadopoulos (2015) and Ben Mahmoud-Jouini et al. (2016), have evaluated organizations that adopt more than one methodology for the development of their products and services. However, these articles did not compare traditional and nontraditional methodologies to verify the differences and similarities in the results. Serrador and Pinto (2015) demonstrated a weak superiority of the agile method over traditional methods in project success.
In 2013, the Gartner Group created the term bimodal Information Technology (IT) to describe the adoption of two project management methodologies within the same organization, to allow for the choice of the most appropriate method for its projects (Aron & McDonald, 2014). Although the term is new, the concept and its adoption by organizations already existed (Horlach, Drews, & Schirmer, 2016). In this situation, organizations need to simultaneously handle two design environments, in which two important factors are the profile of people and leadership and the organizational structure. Mode one develops projects in a well-defined organizational structure and processes, while mode two needs a culture focused on innovation, which allows agility to deal with uncertainty and changes, with support from users and senior management (Gartner, 2015). According to Anguelov and Angelova (2016), mode one is based on the leadership style of command and control, while mode two has a participatory structure of team members. The leader in mode two becomes a facilitator and mediator, instead of being a controller. Also according to these authors, in mode two, the team is no longer composed mostly of specialists and is instead composed of a multidisciplinary team. It is therefore relevant to evaluate the performance of the team in this double environment with different needs and characteristics. Due to team or leadership performance factors, and the need to adapt to management models, projects fail in certain criteria and succeed in others (Patah & Carvalho, 2012).
There are various styles of leadership (Fleishman et al., 1991), but in this study we evaluate transactional, transformational, and empowering leadership (Pearce & Sims Jr, 2002). According to these authors, transactional leadership is based on goals and rewards for team engagement, and hopes to achieve goals by improving team performance. Transformational leadership expects to achieve high performance through a charismatic and transformative leader of the team and its performance. Empowering leadership encourages individual thinking, self-development, and leadership sharing to achieve the desired performance of the team.
One of the most addressed topics in team performance research is the impact of leadership, seen in the articles by Peltokorpi and Hasu (2015), Boies, Fiset, and Gill (2015however, are not well understood. To identify the intervening processes inherent in this relationship, we experimentally manipulated the leadership style assigned to 44 teams taking part in a resource-maximization task. Teams were exposed either to a leader using inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, or a control condition. Our findings reveal important differences between leadership styles in communication and team outcomes (objective task performance and creativity), Sousa and Van Dierendonck (2016), Neil, Wagstaff, Weller, and Lewis (2016), Liu et al. (2015), Zhang, Cao, and Tjosvold (2011), and Hoch and Kozlowski (2014). All of these studies concluded that team performance is directly linked to leadership, especially transformational leadership, but none of them evaluated the difference in this performance in projects with distinct management methods, that is, traditional and agile.
An organization that has projects in modes one and two may require its managers to act in projects in both modes. As the requirements are different, and not only technical, the question arises regarding whether one leadership style would be more efficient in some of the environments. Thus, the main objective of this article is to identify the influence of the type of leadership on the performance of the project team, according to the methods applied in the management of software development projects. There are also the following secondary objectives:
* Identify the influence of the type of leadership, whether transactional, transformational, or empowering, on the performance of the project team.
* Identify the influence of the project methodology on the relationship between the leadership and the performance of the project team.
In the next item, the concepts of team performance, leadership styles, and project management methods are defined, because they support the empirical research carried out by Pearce and Sims Jr (2002), detailed in item 3, together with the methodological procedures we adopt. Item 4 describes the results and then we present the conclusions.
2 theoretical Framework
In the next items, team performance and leadership and their styles will be discussed to support the analysis performed in this article, as well as project management methods. During this discussion we present the research hypotheses.
2.1 Team performance
Team performance is a theme that has been studied by many researchers for a long time, relating to several factors. For example, Ancona and Caldwell (1992) evaluated the impact of the diversity of composition of team members. Boies, Fiset, and Gill (2015however, are not well understood. To identify the intervening processes inherent in this relationship, we experimentally manipulated the leadership style assigned to 44 teams taking part in a resource-maximization task. Teams were exposed either to a leader using inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, or a control condition. Our findings reveal important differences between leadership styles in communication and team outcomes (objective task performance and creativity) verified that communication and trust are essential for leadership, specifically for the transformational style. Sousa and Van Dierendonck (2016) identified leadership shared by the leader as having a strong influence on team integration, increasing team performance due to the sharing of information. Neil, Wagstaff, Weller, and Lewis (2016) studied the transformational leadership style, indicating that the way the team works to achieve important goals and the use of the emotional intelligence of team members have a direct impact on performance.
Another factor also evaluated is how the team is managed. If the team has conflict-of-activity management, team performance will be positively impacted (De Dreu & Weingart, 2002). Team performance can be assessed from two main perspectives: effectiveness and efficiency. These perspectives have the following three points of view: result of the work from the client's point of view, from the point of view of the organization, and from the point of view of the team (Hoegl & Gemuenden, 2001)that \"good teamwork\" increases the success of in- novative projects, raises new questions: What is teamwork, and how can it be measured? Why and how is teamwork related to the success of innovative projects? How strong is the relation- ship between teamwork and various measures of project success such as performance or team member satisfaction? This article develops a comprehensive concept of the collaboration in teams, called Teamwork Quality (TWQ. In this study, we analyze effectiveness in the performance of the team, using seven different dimensions (Pearce & Sims Jr, 2002): output, quality, changes, organization and planning, interpersonal, value, and overall.
According to Pearce and Sims (2002), the output dimension takes the form of team deliveries, with a consistent and effective workload, and important changes; while the quality dimension comprises the production of high quality, accuracy, and consistency in the execution of the activities and elimination of definitive problems by the team. The changes dimension emerges through tackling new problems effectively, with behavioral changes to meet the changes either in the organization or in the project, as well as the ability to cope well with changes. The organization and planning dimension takes the form of goals and priorities, with the development of viable plans, operations in major problems, and clear priorities (Pearce & Sims Jr, 2002). According to these authors, the interpersonal dimension comprises the communication of progress, with the possibility of doing so proactively, keeping everyone informed about the complete situation of the project; while the value dimension emerges through the contribution of the team to the organization, making contributions that add value to the organization. The overall dimension takes the form of high efficiency and excellent progress of the team, with good performance and good work.
2.2 Leadership
One role of extreme importance within teams is that of the leader, because according to Grant, Graham, and Heberling (2001)...
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