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Motivating open source software developers: influence of transformational and transactional leaderships

Published: 13 April 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) is developed by geographically distributed unpaid programmers. The success of such a seemingly chaotic OSS project will largely depend on how the project leader organizes and motivates the developers to contribute. Grounded on leadership and motivation theories, we proposed and tested a research model that seeks to explain the behavioral effects of a leader on the developers' motivation to contribute. Survey data collected from 118 OSS developers on Sourceforge.net was used to test the research model. The results indicate that leaders' transformational leadership is positively related to developers' intrinsic motivation and leaders' active management by exception, a form of transactional leadership, is positively related to developers' extrinsic motivation.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      SIGMIS CPR '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on computer personnel research: Forty four years of computer personnel research: achievements, challenges & the future
      April 2006
      368 pages
      ISBN:1595933492
      DOI:10.1145/1125170
      • General Chair:
      • Conrad Shayo,
      • Program Chairs:
      • Kate Kaiser,
      • Terry Ryan
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 13 April 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. leadership
      2. motivation
      3. open source software development

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      • (2014)Statistical analysis of popular open source software projects and their communities2014 6th International Conference on Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ICITEE)10.1109/ICITEED.2014.7007913(1-6)Online publication date: Oct-2014
      • (2012)Satisfaction and MotivationInternational Journal of Human Capital and Information Technology Professionals10.4018/jhcitp.20121001043:4(39-56)Online publication date: 1-Oct-2012
      • (2012)Measurement and MotivationThe IFPUG Guide to IT and Software Measurement10.1201/b11884-21(273-303)Online publication date: 5-Jun-2012
      • (2012)Train and retainProceedings of the 50th annual conference on Computers and People Research10.1145/2214091.2214112(79-84)Online publication date: 31-May-2012
      • (2012)Empirical studies of global volunteer collaboration in the development of free and open source softwareACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/2108144.210815637:2(1-11)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2012
      • (2011)Analysis of Projects and Volunteer Participation in Large Scale Free and Open Source Software EcosystemACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes10.1145/1943371.194338936:2(1-5)Online publication date: 5-May-2011
      • (2009)A systematic review of theory use in studies investigating the motivations of software engineersACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/1525880.152588318:3(1-29)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2009
      • (2009)Models of motivation in software engineeringInformation and Software Technology10.1016/j.infsof.2008.05.00951:1(219-233)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2009
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