The Influence Of Ethical Leadership,Team Beliefs And Skills And Team Learning On Team Performance In Software Development Projects

With intense competition and rapidly changing customer demands,software development is essential to a company’s competitive advantage.Thailand’s software industry is part of the country’s strategic objective to increase international competitiveness.However,Thai software researchers tend to ignore and undervalue the study of approaches to promote team learning in software development teams.Software development projects are highly complex problem-solving activities that require intensive information processing by the team to accomplish performance under high pressure.The ability to learn at the team level is critical to effectively managing information overload and complexity.However,learning in the team does not happen automatically,but should be initiated by their team leaders.Thus,team leaders are expected to provide effective leadership to be responsible for team learning and implementing effective control management in software development projects.Ethical leadership is critical to the effective functioning of team performance and influences team beliefs,skills,and learning through social cognitive processes.Observing ethical leaders who respond strategically to difficulties and “do the right thing” triggers team members to believe they are proactive and rational learners.Therefore,it is critical to develop the potential of the software workforce to accelerate the growth of the country’s software industry.Taking this into account,five theories were used in this study to develop empirical research: organizational control theory,leadership theory,learning theory,social cognitive theory,and team performance framework.The three research questions are as follows: 1)How ethical leadership of team leaders affects team performance in software development projects in Thailand.2)How team learning processes affect team performance,and 3)How team beliefs(e.g.problem-solving efficacy,norm of information exchange)and skills play as an interaction between ethical leadership and team learning processes in software development teams.The data was collected through a web-based survey.The sample of this study consists of 354 software development project teams from software and IT consulting firms in Thailand.Hypothesis analysis was tested using structural equation modeling.The results show that ethical leadership has an impact on team beliefs and skills.Team beliefs and skills have positive relationships with two team learning processes,namely team information processing and team information storage and retrieval.This study found no positive effect of team beliefs and skills on team information acquisition.Moreover,all team learning processes have a positive effect on team performance.Also,ethical leadership has a positive impact on team performance.This study provides the three main contributions to relevant theory and literature as follows.1)The findings support the software industry’s value proposition by demonstrating the importance of ethical leadership in software development performance.This finding adds a new perspective to the advancement of organizational control theory by suggesting that ethical leadership combines both formal and informal morally based control,both of which boost software development project performance.2)The findings contribute to information processing theory by demonstrating that information processing-based team learning processes can increase software project performance.3)The social cognitive theory has received little attention in software development project performance research.The results contribute to social cognitive theory by showing that ethical leadership,team problem solving efficacy,norm of information exchange,skills,and team learning are important positive interactive components for software development project performance.This study provides guidance for organizations to leverage their strategies to achieve project performance.