Action-embedded transformational leadership in self-managing global information systems development teams

While software development teams are becoming more and more distributed around the globe, most software development methodologies used by global teams prescribe self-managing teams. Transformational leadership is the key to successful information systems development and use for competitive advantage. Yet, little is known about transformational leadership in self-managing global information systems development team settings. This study answers the research question of how leaders emerge and strategically influence systems development in self-managing global information systems development teams. This question is answered with a grounded theory study of Apache Open Source Software development teams. A theoretical model of action-embedded transformational leadership is developed to demonstrate how leaders emerge and strategically influence systems development efforts through their leadership, which is embedded in their work-related actions.     

Examining effective technology project leadership traits and behaviors

Effective project team leadership theory is explored from the perspective of leader traits, skills, roles, and behaviors. Existing leadership traits and behaviors are examined from organization science empirical studies, they are differentiated from management functions, and the gap between extant theory and the project management domain is highlighted through this research. Leadership principles are examined from actual organizational work settings, specifically dynamic projects, with a view to discovering what actually happens as compared with espoused theory. The underlying research question is whether these theories hold up and can be effectively integrated to the project management domain. The significance of leadership behavior differences at the project and organizational levels is grounded on empirical evidence. The reflection of integrated organizational science and project leadership theory using qualitative and quantitative research methods contributes to the body of knowledge by sharing and learning in professional and academic communities of practice.     

Team leader strategies for enabling collaboration technology adaptation: team technology knowledge to improve globally distributed systems development work

Active management of team adaptation of collaboration technologies offers an important lever for influencing success rates in distributed project work, particularly in settings characterized by high task interdependence, such as information systems development (ISD). Substantial uncertainty exists as to how a leader might influence such technology adaptation during project work. Prior research indicates that a major leader resource to accomplish technology adaptation in these settings would be team technology knowledge (TTK). This empirical field study develops a five-factor model of strategies regarding awareness of TTK that team leaders take in intervening to affect technology adaptation in distributed ISD projects. The analysis indicates insights into when and why these strategies are effective and how they relate to each other as well as the leader's awareness of TTK. The study provides a way for ISD team leaders to approach improving team collaboration from a socio-technical perspective as well as insights into potential levers for improving team technology adaptation and the efficacy of ISD projects.     

Human Behavior Analysis for Highlight Ranking in Broadcast Racket Sports Video

The majority of existing work on sports video analysis concentrates on highlight extraction. Little work focuses on the important issue as how the extracted highlights should be organized. In this paper, we present a multimodal approach to organize the highlights extracted from racket sports video grounded on human behavior analysis using a nonlinear affective ranking model. Two research challenges of highlight ranking are addressed, namely affective feature extraction and ranking model construction. The basic principle of affective feature extraction in our work is to extract sensitive features which can stimulate user's emotion. Since the users pay most attention to player behavior and audience response in racket sport highlights, we extract affective features from player behavior including action and trajectory, and game-specific audio keywords. We propose a novel motion analysis method to recognize the player actions. We employ support vector regression to construct the nonlinear highlight ranking model from affective features. A new subjective evaluation criterion is proposed to guide the model construction. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches, we have tested them on more than ten-hour broadcast tennis and badminton videos. The experimental results demonstrate that our action recognition approach significantly outperforms the existing appearance-based method. Moreover, our user study shows that the affective highlight ranking approach is effective.     

Profiling grounded theory approaches in information systems research

Studies claiming to use the Grounded theory methodology (GTM) have been quite prevalent in information systems (IS) literature. A cursory review of this literature reveals conflict in the understanding of GTM, with a variety of grounded theory approaches apparent. The purpose of this investigation was to establish what alternative grounded theory approaches have been employed in IS, and to what extent each has been used. In order to accomplish this goal, a comprehensive set of IS articles that claimed to have followed a grounded theory approach were reviewed. The articles chosen were those published in the widely acknowledged top eight IS-centric journals, since these journals most closely represent exemplar IS research. Articles for the period 1985-2008 were examined. The analysis revealed four main grounded theory approaches in use, namely (1) the classic grounded theory approach, (2) the evolved grounded theory approach, (3) the use of the grounded theory approach as part of a mixed methodology, and (4) the application of grounded theory techniques, typically for data analysis purposes. The latter has been the most common approach in IS research. The classic approach was the least often employed, with many studies opting for an evolved or mixed method approach. These and other findings are discussed and implications drawn.     

Understanding technology use in global virtual teams: Research methodologies and methods

Context

The globalisation of activities associated with software development and use has introduced many challenges in practice, and also (therefore) many for research. While the predominant approach to research in software engineering has followed a positivist science model, this approach may be sub-optimal when addressing problems with a dominant social or cultural dimension, such as those frequently encountered when studying work practices in a globally distributed team setting.The investigation of such a team reported in this paper provides one example of an alternative approach to research in a global context, through a longitudinal interpretive field study seeking to understand how global virtual teams mediated the use of technology. The study involved a large collective of faculty and support staff plus student members based in the geographically and temporally distant locations of New Zealand, the United States of America and Sweden.

Objective

Our focus in this paper is on the conduct of research in the context of global software activities, and in particular, as applied to the actions and interactions of global virtual teams. We consider the appropriateness of various methodologies and methods in enabling such issues to be addressed.

Method

We describe how we undertook a substantial field study of global virtual teams, and highlight how the adopted structuration theory, action research and grounded theory methodologies applied to the analysis of email data, enabled us to deliver effectively against our goals.

Results

We believe that the approach taken suited a research context in which situated practices were occurring over time in a highly complex domain, ensuring that our results were both strongly grounded and relevant to practice. It has resulted in the generation of substantive theory and techniques that have been adapted and applied on a pilot basis in further field settings.

Conclusion

We conclude that globally distributed teamwork presents a complex context which demands new research approaches, beyond the limited set customarily applied by software engineering researchers. We advocate experimenting with different research methodologies and methods so that we have a more rounded repertoire to address the most important and relevant issues in global software development research, with the forms of rigour that suit the chosen approach.     

From briefing,through scenario,to debriefing: the maritime instructor’s work during simulator-based training

Simulator-based training in maritime education is an illustrative and paradigmatic example of how the introduction of high-end technologies creates new challenges for instructors: using simulators in educational settings for teaching skills that must be transferred to a professional work practice. This study draws on ethnographic fieldwork and video recordings of learning activities in a maritime navigation course to investigate the instructional challenges and opportunities for connecting general learning lessons to practical situations in different phases of simulator-based training. In particular, taking on a situated action approach, the research questions concern how the participants are orienting towards general instructions from the prospective briefing phase in the subsequent scenario and debriefing phases of training, considering how the social and material resources in the simulator environment organize the learning activities. The results show that connecting the general to the specifics of navigational situations is a continuous instructional achievement that is maintained throughout all stages of training, from briefing, through scenario, to debriefing. Hence, the results are stressing the importance for both in-scenario instructions and post-simulation debriefing in order to facilitate learning towards a profession. Moreover, the results emphasize how technologies in the simulator environment offer opportunities for instructors to continuously monitor, correct and assess the students’ activities towards the learning outcomes.     

信息项目团队领导方式研究

领导方式的选择是信息项目团队建设的关键问题,选择恰当的领导方式将会提高信息项目团队的绩效。本文对影响信息项目团队领导方式的三个主要因素——项目生命周期、专业经验水平和任务不确定性进行了认真地分析,并且在此研究基础上,运用层次分析法构建了选择信息项目团队领导方式的模型,以便企业在组建信息项目团队时,能够快速准确的选择团队的领导方式。     

Creativity‐Stimulating Leadership: A Critical Incident Study of Leaders' Influence on Creativity in Research Groups

This study examines how group leaders in academic and industrial research settings stimulate creativity in group members. The study uses a modified version of the critical incident technique to collect creative incidents as perceived and reported in interviews with research group members. These incidents were content analysed according to the reported creative situation and the creativity‐stimulating leadership behaviours. Reasons for the importance of the incidents are given (each incident is subdivided into categories and subcategories). The highest ranked categories deal with how leaders provide expertise in research meetings and in supervisory situations, in particular for the advancement of research. Four types of creativity‐stimulating leadership behaviours are also discussed. The study finds few differences between how leaders in universities and industries stimulate creativity.     

Control sharing in human-robot team interaction

The interaction between humans and robot teams is highly relevant in many application domains, for example in collaborative manufacturing, search and rescue, and logistics. It is well-known that humans and robots have complementary capabilities: Humans are excellent in reasoning and planning in unstructured environments, while robots are very good in performing tasks repetitively and precisely. In consequence, one of the key research questions is how to combine human and robot team decision making and task execution capabilities in order to exploit their complementary skills. From a controls perspective this question boils down to how control should be shared among them. This article surveys advances in human-robot team interaction with special attention devoted to control sharing methodologies. Additionally, aspects affecting the control sharing design, such as human behavior modeling, level of autonomy and human-machine interfaces are identified. Open problems and future research directions towards joint decision making and task execution in human-robot teams are discussed.     

Using a grounded theory approach for exploring software product management challenges

The traditional requirements engineering (RE) research paradigm, along with most engineering research and practice, is commonly seen to belong to the philosophical tradition of positivism, which construes knowledge as accruing through the systematic observation of stable and knowable phenomena. Consequently, RE methods tend to ignore social issues. However, due to the dominant role of the human being in RE, there has been an increasing need to rely on research methods of the social sciences, arts, and humanities for RE related findings. This paper illustrates one example of how social aspects in RE have been explored with a research method adopted from social sciences research tradition. Drawing heavily on the research reported in the doctoral thesis of the principal author, we describe in this paper: (1) how a study using a grounded theory approach was designed and conducted for exploring market-driven requirements engineering (MDRE) challenges in seven companies, (2) how the analysis eventually proceeded toward a proposed theory, and (3) our experiences of using a grounded theory approach within the discipline of RE.     

“You Are Well Clear of Friendlies”: Diagnostic Error and Cooperative Work in an Iraq War Friendly Fire Incident

This paper considers diagnostic error in cooperative work as a contributing factor for a military ‘friendly fire’ incident. It emphasises aspects of the moment-to-moment sequential organisation of interaction, and turn design, to explore the significance for the error of a loss of intersubjectivity and joint understanding. The paper uses as data the cockpit video recording from a US Air Force aircraft that fired on a British armoured vehicle convoy in March 2003, in the early days of the Iraq War. The analytic approach is grounded in concerns of ethnomethodology (EM) and conversation analysis (CA) for uncovering the language, practices and processes of reasoning by which people accomplish social actions, particularly for conducting cooperative work. The paper highlights the impact for the participants’ perception, understanding and action of varying forms of participation, for example as speaker, addressed recipient, or as potential overhearing non-addressed recipient, and relative to participants’ involvement in the task at hand, and to their possibilities for accessing relevant phenomena (i.e. the vehicles and their visible features). Diagnosis in cooperative work demands that participants act relative to one another’s diverse perspectives and representations of the scene and its objects and events. Diagnosis requires participants to manage situations of ambiguity and uncertainty, and to resolve apparent conflicts of understanding and perceptual evidence. The paper examines the social character of diagnostic work by showing how processes of cooperation can be vulnerable and ultimately go wrong, particularly when multiple participants are physically distributed and interaction is mediated by communication technologies such as radio.     

Manual handling human loads in a hospital: an exploratory study to identify nurses' perceptions

The high incident rate of musculoskeletal back problems in nursing work has long been recognized, and in many studies patient handling has been identified as a contributory factor. This paper seeks to question the application of the 'ergonomic model' for risk assessment of manual handling operations (MHO) as advocated in the MHO regulations. It describes an exploratory study, which uses a participatory approach and the qualitative analysis method of grounded theory to determine the factors perceived as important by the nurses for patient-handling tasks. The development of a model of these factors is discussed, together with the main outcome of questioning the practical benefits of dividing the generic task of patient handling into subtasks, eg bathing, for MHO risk assessment.     

The Impact of Perceived Work Complexity and Shared Leadership on Team Performance of IT Employees of South African Firms

ABSTRACT

This article investigates how work complexity, as perceived by Information Technology (IT) employees, influences team performance, and examines the role played by shared leadership. The findings of this study that collected data from 204 IT employees in South Africa show that perceived work complexity negatively predicts team performance while shared leadership negatively predicts perceived work complexity and positively predicts team performance.     

Towards models of tasks and task complexity in supervisory control applications

Dynamic task environments in supervisory control situations differ from those traditionally investigated in problem-solving research in that (1) several task goals exist in parallel, (2) task goals change dynamically as die behaviour of the technical process changes, and (3) information required to accomplish task goals changes across time. In the present work, it is suggested that such dynamic task environments can be described using two types of task goal networks, namely a control task goal (CTG) network and an information processing goal (IPG) network. CTG networks are generated by analysis of the operational states required to produce the commodity for which a technical system has been designed. For example, such analyses can be performed using approaches such as Mitchell's operator function model or canonical means-end analyses. IPG networks are generated by using the recenUy proposed functional information and knowledge acquisition (FIKA) modelling technique. Two examples from different domains illustrate how these task goal networks can be used to describe dynamic task environments. Finally, two different ways of using the task modelling approach are briefly discussed.     

Video task analysis in high performance teams

A task-specific video recording effort at a trauma centre was studied. Task analysis methodology and an expert review of videos was used to access cognitive aspects of work and performance. Data collection included questionnaires and video reviews that used a template approach to task analysis and audio recordings of the experts think aloud performance assessment. Among 48 video records of airway management, performance deficiencies were identified including communication failures, omission of preparatory and confirmatory checks and lack of patient vital signs monitoring that lessened the margin of patient safety and caused a life-threatening critical incident. The analysis of aggregate data from multiple such videos of airway management allowed detection of the performance problems and development of an equipment design change and a task/communication training algorithm. The performance improvement and the lessons learned from using video as data in a medical domain are described. Targeted video task analysis with expert review may be generalisable to other medical procedures and non-medical domains.     

Leader delegation in global software teams: occurrence and effects

Global teams are an important work structure in software development projects. Managing such complex global software projects presents many challenges to traditional leadership wisdom, in particular, how, why and when the leaders should delegate responsibility and authority. Delegation is considered an important leadership component to motivate and grow subordinates. Cultural differences, skill level disparity and potential competition between different software development sites creates a management context which is much different from where traditional leadership theories were developed. This study investigates leader delegation behaviors in global software teams and explores the reasons and impact of delegation strategies on global team performance. Semi-structured interviews and a survey was used to collect data from global software team managers and members from four countries of a Fortune 100 IT service company. The results of this study include in-depth analysis of hows and whys of leader delegation in global teams and a theoretical model for analyzing global team leader delegation occurrence and effects.     

Building a hierarchical structure model of enablers that affect the software process improvement in software SMEs—A mixed method approach

In the present study authors developed a mixed approach based on qualitative and interpretive approaches to model and analyze software process improvement (SPI) enablers in software small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In phase-I after listing the research questions, the data is synthesized using the observations of stakeholders in their work domain followed by semi-structured interviews. The results of the qualitative analysis, as key learning's formed the basis for grouping of SPI indicators into nine key SPI enablers. Open, focused and theoretical coding procedures in grounded theory were used to create categories, subcategories, and thematic relationships among these enablers. Further, in phase-II, the hierarchical structure model of SPI enablers is build using the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) approach and influencing dynamics among the enablers is analyzed using MICMAC analysis. From the results of the study, it is concluded that organization, people, and technology issues are important drivers, on which SMEs shall proactively focus for successful implementation of SPI initiatives.     

The contingent effects of leadership on team collaboration in virtual teams

Decision-making in virtual teams creates challenges for leaders to structure team processes and provide task support. To help advance our knowledge of leadership in virtual teams, we explore the interaction effects between leadership styles and media richness on task cohesion and cooperative climate, which in turn influence team performance in decision-making tasks. Results from a laboratory study suggest that transactional leadership behaviors improve task cohesion of the team, whereas transformational leadership behaviors improve cooperative climate within the team which, in turn, improves task cohesion. However, these effects of leadership depend on media richness. Specifically, they occur only when media richness is low. Our results also suggest that task cohesion leads to group consensus and members’ satisfaction with the discussion, whereas cooperative climate improves discussion satisfaction and reduces time spent on the task.