Motivations in Open Source Software Communities: The Mediating Role of Effort Intensity and Goal Commitment

Abstract

As a community-based innovation, the open source software (OSS) development phenomenon has received great attention from researchers and practitioners. Understanding the factors that affect the involvement and contributions of participants in OSS projects is of signifi cance to facilitate project success. This paper investigates the effects of motivation on participant performance in OSS projects, drawing upon self-determination theory to examine how task effort (i.e., effort intensity and goal commitment) mediates the relationships between a spectrum of motivations and individual performance. The research model is supported by survey data from 204 participants in OSS projects. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications are discussed. KEY WORDS AND PHRASES:Motivation, open source software (OSS), performance, task effort.As a community-based innovation, open source software (OSS) projects such as Linux and Apache are exemplars of organizational models for innovation and product development [24,73]. The distinction of OSS projects is that their participants, most likely volunteers, collaborate with one other and continuously improve the software programs through the Internet [40]. The participants also provide mundane services that are critical for the viability of the communities, such as documentation and helping new members. Since there are no traditional organizational structures of control, the viability and sustainability of OSS projects rely on participants' self-managing contributions [66,67,73,74]. Studying the factors that lead individuals to participate and remain engaged in OSS projects helps us to understand the success of OSS projects [5].A number of studies address such questions as "What factors drive participants to contribute to OSS communities?" and "How do OSS project groups keep participants engaged in the community?" (e.g., [5,30,31,73,80]). From the personal perspective, studies have found that participation in OSS projects is driven by intrinsic or extrinsic motivations [30,38,60]. From the social perspective, research has found that conviction of the ideology associated with OSS development and identifi cation with OSS project groups serve as linchpins in enabling OSS efforts and success [5,31,39,51,66].The extant literature only assesses the direct main effect of each of these four motivational factors on individual participation in or contribution to OSS projects (e.g., [30,60]). There is a lack of research examining the effect of motivation on participation outcomes such as performance. Performance is defi ned as the cognitive outcome of conducting a series of activities [78]. The viability and sustainability of OSS communities rely more on the outcomes than on the act of participating. Therefore, investigating how motivational factors affect task performance will provide practical guidelines for possible KE AND ZHANGmechanisms that enhance the chance of project success. In addition, there is no prior study examining the effect of mediator variables on the relat...

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