Research On The Performance Of Software Outsourcing Project Based On Social Relationship Characteristics

With the development of global economic integration, more and more developed countries choose to outsource all or part of non-core business to developing countries, so that they can spend more time on their core business. Through outsourcing activities, they also achieve the goals of improving software quality, shortening the developing time, saving labor costs, and improving enterprise efficiency. With abundant human resources, low labor costs, active market environment and other advantages, China has gradually become a main undertaking country in the software outsourcing market. As a distributed knowledge team, software outsourcing project team has double characteristics:knowledge-based and virtual. How to carry out the rapid and effective knowledge integration among team members is not only related to the success of software outsourcing project, but also related to the accumulation and improvement of software development skills.This research constructed a theoretical model of influencing project performance from the perspective of social relationship characteristics. This study investigated knowledge integration behavior and project performance in team through integrating social cognitive theory, social capital theory and social identity theory as effective explanation mechanism for social relationship. By empirical research methods and on the basis of literatures review,we constructed the theoretical model and proposed the corresponding research hypotheses. Taking software outsourcing project team as research object,we investigated 188 project team members in Beijing and Dalian software outsourcing enterprises through the way of questionnaire investigation. Then, we used SPSS 20.0 to do descrptive statistical analys, and used SmartPLS 3.0 to do reliability analysis, validity analysis, factor analysis and structural equation model analysis. Through data analysis, we validated the proposed model and hypotheses. The main conclusions are as follows:(1) In the software outsourcing project team, the effect of social cognition:team outcome expectation has a positive effect on knowledge transfer performance, but self-efficacy has a negative effect on it. Both self-efficacy and team outcome expectation have positive effect on project success.(2) In the software outsourcing project team, the effect of social capital:social interaction ties, trust and shared language have positive effect on knowledge transfer performance, but shared vision has a part negative effect on it. Shared vision has a positive effect on project success, but trust has a negative effect on it. In addition, social interaction ties and shared language have no effect on project success.(3) In the software outsourcing project team, the effect of social identification:cognitive and evaluative identification have positive effect on knowledge transfer performance, but affective identification has a negative effect on it. Affective and evaluative identification have positive effect on project success, but cognitive identification has a negative effect on it.Therefore, outsourcing undertaking enterprises should pay attention to the formation of s social relationship characteristics and let social relationship and emotional factors work well to promote team members' attitude and behavior of knowledge sharing and transferring and improvement of project performance.The above conclusions are beneficial to promote the application of cognitive theory in software outsourcing project team, and provide theoretical contributions and managerial implications for the knowledge integration of software outsourcing enterprises. However, due to some objective and subjective reasons, there are still some shortcomings in this study, which needs further improvement in the future.