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If You Can't Say Something Nice: Factors Contributing to Team Member Silence in Distributed Software Project Teams

Published: 18 June 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Managing software projects is complex. Increasingly, organizations are using different methods and forms of teams to ensure software projects are developed on time, on budget, and meet functionality requirements. One factor that can affect the success of a software development team is the willingness of team members to be fully engaged and to share concerns throughout the effort. Employee silence is the unwillingness of an individual to express concerns. This exploratory research study examines three factors that influence a team member's choice to remain silent when participating in a distributed software project: the individual's level of experience, the role of the offending team member, and the individual's personal responsibility to report. Using a scenario-based experiment, this study finds that some of the factors that are assumed in other contexts of employee silence may not be related in the context of distributed teams in which there is a need to voice concerns among peers.

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  • (2022)A review of how whistleblowing is studied in software engineering, and the implications for research and practiceProceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society10.1145/3510458.3513013(12-23)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
  • (2022)A Review of How Whistleblowing is Studied in Software Engineering, and the Implications for Research and Practice2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS)10.1109/ICSE-SEIS55304.2022.9793939(12-23)Online publication date: May-2022

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGMIS-CPR'18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGMIS Conference on Computers and People Research
    June 2018
    216 pages
    ISBN:9781450357685
    DOI:10.1145/3209626
    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 the author(s) 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: 18 June 2018

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    1. employee silence
    2. is project teams
    3. mum effect
    4. team dynamics
    5. team member silence
    6. whistleblowing

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    SIGMIS-CPR '18: 2018 Computers and People Research Conference
    June 18 - 20, 2018
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    View all
    • (2022)A review of how whistleblowing is studied in software engineering, and the implications for research and practiceProceedings of the 2022 ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society10.1145/3510458.3513013(12-23)Online publication date: 21-May-2022
    • (2022)A Review of How Whistleblowing is Studied in Software Engineering, and the Implications for Research and Practice2022 IEEE/ACM 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS)10.1109/ICSE-SEIS55304.2022.9793939(12-23)Online publication date: May-2022

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