The impact of personality traits and knowledge collection behavior on programmer creativity

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Abstract

Context: Creativity is one of the essential ingredients in successful software engineering. However, majority of the work related to creativity in software engineering has focused on creativity in requirement engineering. Furthermore, there are very few studies that examine programmer creativity and the impact of individual and contextual factors on it.

Objective: The objective of the study is to analyze the impact of the big five personality traits including extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience, as well as knowledge collection behavior on a programmer's creativity intention.

Method: A quantitative survey was conducted and data from 294 programmers, working in offshore software development projects, was collected. The data was later analyzed using Smart-PLS (3.0).

Results and Conclusions: The results indicated that openness to experience, extraversion, conscientiousness and knowledge collection behavior positively predicted a programmer's creativity intention. On the other hand, neuroticism negatively predicts creativity intention of the programmer. The study also concluded that all of the independent variables, except the agreeableness trait, significantly predict creativity intention which in turn significantly predicts creativity. As a result, our conclusions indicate that programmer's personality traits and knowledge collection behavior play a key role in shaping their intention to be creative. Hence, personality traits and knowledge collection behavior should be given due attention during the hiring process of creativity-oriented software companies.

Introduction

Software engineering is a knowledge-based human work, which capitalizes on the knowledge and creativity of humans [1,2]. The central role of humans in software engineering is aptly described by Capretz et al. [3] in the words that, "software is developed by people and for people". However, despite its importance, factors related to humans in software engineering are often ignored and not given equal attention compared to the technical factors [4]. One such human factor is creativity, which has been emphasized in today's knowledge-centric workforce as a driving force and leading factor for the competitive advantage of any organization [5]. Furthermore, innovation and problem solving, which are pertinent to software engineering, also require creativity [6]. Hence, creativity becomes one of the critical factors for the success of software development endeavors [7], [8], [9]. However, despite the great importance of creativity in software engineering, generally the topic has been neglected in prior research [10].

It has been reported that within software development, every task / phase requires a different type of creativity [11]. Therefore, it is important to investigate creativity in all of the phases of software development [6]. However, prior research has focused mainly on creativity in the requirement engineering phase [12], [13] and there is consequently a lack of research work addressing creativity in other phases of software development [14,15]. Programming is considered to be one of the most creative and fun endeavors [15,16]. However, prior research on programmer creativity is minimal [13].

In addition, in an organizational setting, creativity is thought to have influenced or resulted from the interaction of individual and contextual factors [17], [18], [19]. Thus, it becomes pertinent to determine and explain these factors as well as their impact on the development process [20]. The existing literature lacks the investigation of the factors which can potentially influence the creativity of software engineers [8]. The present research attempts to fill these research gaps by identifying programmer's creativity relevant factors and examine their impact on creativity intention of the programmer.

Personality is one of the most important factors influencing creativity. According to the componential theory of creativity, personality characteristics are one of the factors that can spur on or impede creativity [21]. Moreover, personality traits of developers are highly pertinent to the issues which arise during the software development process [22]. However, the research work on personality in software engineering is incomplete, immature, insufficient and inconclusive [22], [23], [24], [25], [26]. Therefore, the first objective of the present research is to examine the impact of big five personality traits on creativity intention of the programmer.

Furthermore, it is widely acknowledged that software development is a knowledge-based collaborative activity [9]. Similarly, for creativity also, knowledge is considered to be a pre-requisite [21,27]. In addition, it is not only knowledge, but collaborative knowledge which guarantees creativity [8,9] as well as effective software development [7,9]. Hence, another objective of the present study is to understand the relationship between one of the forms of knowledge collaboration— namely knowledge collection behavior— and creativity intention. As per the author's knowledge, there is no present study which has examined this relationship.

In a nutshell, the aim of this research is to address programmer creativity and answer the following three research questions: (1) What is the impact of the big five personality traits on a programmer's creativity intention? (2) how does the knowledge collection behavior of programmers impact their creativity intention? And (3) how does creativity intention predict creativity of the programmer?

Section snippets

Programmer's Creativity

Creativity has recently been emphasized in software / Information Technology (IT) development [28]. As mentioned earlier, it is commonly understood that software engineering depends on the creativity and knowledge of humans [2]. This is because complex problem solving and innovation are fundamental requirements for software engineering, and both of the aforementioned facets absolutely require creativity [12,29]. Moreover, software engineers are also found to be inclined towards working on the

Research methodology

The present research is quantitative in nature. A survey questionnaire was used to gather data from programmers working in a GSD environment in software companies in Pakistan. The questionnaire was distributed to programmers in person by the researcher himself, through email and with the help of an enumerator.

Results and discussion

The data was analyzed by using the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) technique of Partial Least Square (PLS). The choice of PLS for the present research stems from a few important and distinguishing considerations including:

  • 1)

    In contrast to the 1st Generation (1 G) techniques (i.e. regression), PLS, like other SEM techniques, enables the researcher to simultaneously model the relationship between multiple independent and dependent constructs and answer the research questions in single,

Extraversion and creativity intention

H1: Extraversion is positively correlated with the creativity intention of the programmer.

According to the results of the present research, extraversion is a significant and positive predictor of creativity intention (T-value: 4.260: P-value: 0.000). The results show that with each unit increase in the extraversion trait, creativity intention increases by 0.138 units.

The reason behind the results can be found in the characteristics associated with the extraversion trait. It is characterized by

Conclusion

The primary aim of this research was to understand the relationship between two individual variables, namely personality traits and knowledge collection behavior, and the creativity of the programmer. The primary respondents of the present research were programmers, particularly those who are working in a GSD based software companies in Pakistan. For this purpose, data was retrieved from 294 programmers.

The findings of the present research have shown that personality traits including

Credit author statement

Dr. Aamir Amin. The research work is part of Dr. Aamir's PhD thesis. He conceptualized the whole research work along with his supervisors. At the same time, he selected the methodology, performed formal analysis, wrote and visualized the original draft. He is also the corresponding author.

Dr. Shuib Basri. Dr. Shuib Basri was the main supervisor for this research work. He supervised the work from beginning (conceptualization) until the final thesis submission and viva voce. He also helped in

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

The authors declare the following financial interests/personal relationships which may be considered as potential competing interests:

Acknowledgement

I would like to specially thank Universiti Teknologi Petronas (UTP) and University Tunku Abdul Rehman (UTAR) for the technical and logistic support during the course of this research.

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