Psychological safety and norm clarity in software engineering teams

Abstract

In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still, few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context. Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction, two important elements of effectiveness.We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38 development teams working for five different organizations. The result of multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger (30% and 71% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety.This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.

Advancing the Study of Human Values in Software Engineering

“…Contributions to this field include studies of: motivation and satisfaction [9]; managing radical software engineers [6]; and successful software engineering practice [21] [28]. Such research recognises that SE is not just about technical skills and competence but is an inherently human endeavour, shaped by such elements as workplace cultures and norms [20], emotions [26] and teamwork [21]. There has also been a recent emergence of research that considers individual values, of which fairness in software systems has been the most prominent, especially as applied in studies of algorithmic bias [13].…”

Role clarity deficiencies can wreck agile teams

“…Our Roles are team-wide agreements, much like team norms (Flynn & Chatman, 2003;Feldman, 1984), but in contrast to those each one is created for a specific team member. Lenberg & Feldt (2018) conclude in a quantitative study that there is a strong business case for achieving team norm clarity and we report qualitatively related evidence for Team-wide role clarity. Hackman (1986) who researched self-organized (mostly non-software) teams for decades, states that (1) people taking personal responsibility is one behavioral sign of self-management (akin to R1-Accept), (2) team members need to be equipped with knowledge and skill relevant for the task (akin to R2-Expertise), and (3) team members employ task performing strategies (akin to R3-Acting).…”

Peer Review #2 of "Role clarity deficiencies can wreck agile teams (v0.1)"

“…Our Roles are team-wide agreements, much like team norms (Flynn and Chatman, 2003;Feldman, 1984), but in contrast to those each one is created for a specific team member. Lenberg and Feldt (2018) conclude in a quantitative study that there is a strong business case for achieving team norm clarity and we report qualitatively related evidence for Team-wide role clarity. Hackman (1986) who researched self-organized (mostly non-software) teams for decades, states that (1) people taking personal responsibility is one behavioral sign of self-management (akin to R1-Accept), (2) team members need to be equipped with knowledge and skill relevant for the task (akin to R2-Expertise), and (3) team members employ task performing strategies (akin to R3-Acting).…”