Team transformational leadership, trust, empowerment, satisfaction, and commitment: Testing a structural equation model in software development teams

This dissertation studied the relationship among team transformational leadership, team trust, job satisfaction, and team commitment of the team members as well as the moderating effect of work status such as contract or permanent employees, team size, leader or member, and educational level in software development teams in the United States of America. A total of 5,375 surveys were distributed and only 69 respondents completed the online survey. Based upon 65 validated respondents, this study conducted a confirmatory factor analysis and evaluated the direct and indirect weights of path coefficients among the latent variables by using the AMOS 6.0 and SPSS 11.0 software at 5% level of significance. The results using path analysis indicate that team transformational leadership is strongly positively related to team empowerment and team trust in software development teams while team empowerment and team trust are not related to job satisfaction in software development teams. There is a slight positive relationship between team job satisfaction and the team commitment. The moderator---large or small size team---has no effect on the relationships between the transformational leadership, team trust, job satisfaction, and team commitment in software development teams. In addition, the level of education does not moderate the relationship between the transformational leadership, team trust, and job satisfaction with one exception. For undergraduate team members with undergraduate levels there is a negative relationship (r = -.44) between job satisfaction and team trust in software development teams. However, the relationship is positive (r = .49) for those with graduate levels of education.