Requirements for the Summary-Reflection Paper:
For each reading article, you are responsible for writing a summary-reflection essay .This essay should reflect your reflections of the concepts and theoretical frameworks discussed and the confusions you may have.Rather than simply repeat or even copy/paste from original reading materials, please focus on your understanding of the concepts and theoretical frameworks. To be more specific, besides a brief summary, you should have a major section dedicated to the confusions you have with the concepts and models in the reading materials. You should comment on those concepts and models with your own opinions based on working experiences, readings from the library, and reflections of your previous learning.
If you just repeat abstract concepts from the reading materials, you will not earn a high score. You should connect concepts with job/internship experiences.
The Impact of Ideology on Effectiveness in Open Source Software Development Teams The Impact of Ideology on Effectiveness in Open Source Software Development Teams Author(s): Katherine J. Stewart and Sanjay Gosain Source: MIS Quarterly, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Jun., 2006), pp. 291-314 Published by: Management Information Systems Research Center, University of Minnesota Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25148732 Accessed: 19-04-2018 18:14 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
[email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Management Information Systems Research Center, University of Minnesota is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to MIS Quarterly This content downloaded from 134.88.255.66 on Thu, 19 Apr 2018 18:14:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Stewart & Gosain/lmpact of Ideology in OSS Development Teams Qjarterly The Impact of Ideology on Effectiveness in Open Source Software Development Teams1 2 By: Katherine J. Stewart Department of Decision and Information Technologies R. H. Smith School of Business University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 U.S.A.
[email protected] Sanjay Gosain Department of Decision and Information Technologies R. H. Smith School of Business University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 U.S.A.
[email protected] Abstract The emerging work on understanding open source software has questioned what leads to effectiveness in OSS develop ment teams in the absence of formal controls, and it has pointed to the importance of ideology. This paper develops V. Sambamurthy was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Vivek Choudhury was the associate editor. Brian Butler, Catherine Ridings, and Youngjin Yoo served as reviewers. 2 An earlier version of this paper was presented in the research-in-progress track at the 22nd International Conference on Information Systems, December 2001. The first author's work on this project was partly supported by the National Science Foundation Award IIS-0347376. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Science Foundation. a framework of the OSS community ideology (including specific norms, beliefs, and values) and a theoretical model to show how adherence to components of the ideology impacts effectiveness in OSS teams. The model is based on the idea that the tenets of the OSS ideology motivate behaviors that enhance cognitive trust and communication quality and encourage identification with the project team, which enhances affective trust. Trust and communication in turn impact OSS team effectiveness. The research considers two kinds of effectiveness in OSS teams: the attraction and reten tion of developer input and the generation of project outputs. Hypotheses regarding antecedents to each are developed. Hypotheses are tested using survey and objective data on OSS projects. Results support the main thesis that OSS team members' adherence to the tenets of the OSS community ideology impacts OSS team effectiveness and reveal that different components impact effectiveness in different ways. Of particular interest is the finding that adherence to some ideological components was beneficial to the effectiveness of the team in terms of attracting and retaining input, but detrimental to the output of the team. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. Keywords: Open source software, trust, ideology, com munication, virtual teams Introduction While the practices associated with open source software (OSS) development have been in use for decades, recent years have seen a surge of interest in OSS across developers, businesses, governments, and researchers. Tens of thousands of projects have been registered on Sourceforge, a website devoted to supporting OSS development (http://www. MIS Quarterly Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 291-314/June 2006 291 This content downloaded from 134.88.255.66 on Thu, 19 Apr 2018 18:14:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Stewart & Gosain/lmpact of Ideology in OSS Development Teams sourceforge.net), and many large companies have become involved in OSS.3 Similarly, government institutions have begun trying to create effective policy with regard to open source software and development practices.4 As the phenom enon of OSS has grown, researchers in many fields ranging from sociology to computer science, economics, and infor mation systems have started studying it, and a rich base of literature has begun to appear. This literature often views OSS teams as kinds of virtual teams or organizations (Crowston and Scozzi 2002; Gallivan 2001; Malone and Laubacher 1998; Markus et al. 2000), but with some unique aspects. OSS teams are often composed of volunteers working without financial remuneration directly tied to their contributions, and their output (e.g., source code) is generally made available to any interested users with little or no charge. Further, these teams usually work without the formal a priori requirements that tend to be used to guide and evaluate commercial software development efforts (Scacchi 2002). These unique aspects of OSS have led many to question why developers contribute (Hars and Ou 2002) and how their dispersed efforts are controlled in order to result in viable outputs (Gallivan 2001). Answers to these questions may lie, in part, in another unique feature of OSS development: the ideology of the OSS devel opment community. Researchers and developers have iden tified ideological tenets associated with the open source development community in which OSS teams function, and several have suggested that it may be the ideology that facili tates team effectiveness in the absence of traditional organi zational incentives and controls (Bergquist and Ljungberg 2001; Markus et al. 2000; Raymond 2001). This research investigates that proposition by identifying the key ideo logical tenets of the OSS community and examining means by which they may facilitate three important outcomes related to OSS team effectiveness: attraction and retention of devel opers to projects, devotion of effort by project developers, and the completion of recognized work tasks. The basic thesis underlying the study is that OSS team members' adherence to the tenets of the overarching OSS community ideology may have a positive effect on these outcomes because the ideology fosters trust and good communication practices by encouraging behaviors and orientations that are beneficial to the team's work. IBM contributed code fixes and features to Apache (Ljungberg 2000). Dell, HP, and Oracle support versions of their products for the Linux platform (Gallivan2001). A number of third world countries, for example, are proposing to use GNU/Linux for low cost computing platforms (http://www.linuxjoumal.com/ article.php?sid=6049). The next section provides a brief discussion of the nature of ideology and the role it plays in OSS teams. The paper then summarizes the main tenets of the OSS ideology and discusses the relevance of the three aforementioned effectiveness outcomes in OSS teams. This discussion is used as the basis for developing hypotheses regarding the effects of a teams' adherence to these particular ideological tenets on team members' motivations and behaviors relevant to the effective ness of the team. The methods section describes how the model was tested by combining survey and public data on OSS projects. The discussion section summarizes the results and outlines implications, limitations, and contributions of the research. OSS Ideology and OSS Team Effectiveness HI^HHHHHHH There are norms common to nearly all mature, sustained open source projects (Bretthauer 2002, p. 3) [Open source movements are] loosely coupled communities kept together by strong common values (Ljungberg 2000, p. 208) Contributors...are motivated by the per sonal benefit of using an improved software product and by social values such as altruism, reputation, and ideology (Markus et al. 2000, p. 14) As the quotations demonstrate, the ideology associated with OSS development has been widely suggested as a lynchpin in enabling OSS efforts. We employ Trice and Beyer's (1993, p. 33) definition of ideology as "shared, relatively coherently interrelated sets of emotionally charged beliefs, values, and norms that bind some people together and help them make sense of their worlds." Beliefs refer to understandings of causal relationships, values refer to preferences for some behaviors or outcomes over others, and norms refer to behavioral expectations (Trice and Beyer 1993). Although ideology is by definition shared, adherence to a particular ideological tenet may vary across subgroups. Ideology is an aspect of culture (Trice and Beyer 1993). Just as the ideology of an organizational culture is influenced by the larger national culture in which it exists (Hofstede 1980; Hofstede et al. 1990), organizational subunits may have their own unique subcultures, varying in their ideological content. 292 MIS Quarterly Vol. 30 No. 2/June 2006 This content downloaded from 134.88.255.66 on Thu, 19 Apr 2018 18:14:34 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Stewart & Gosain/lmpact of Ideology in OSS Development Teams Open source developers have often been said to constitute a community, identifiable by its common ideology (Ljungberg 2000). At the same time, subgroups are formed around pro jects within that community, and such subgroups may vary in the extent to which they conform to the overarching com munity ideology. Ljungberg (2000, p. 210) suggests that commitment to the ideology varies widely across developers: "At one end of the spectrum there is great zeal.. .at the other end there is no big deal about the ideology." In settings such as OSS development where behavior may be hard to observe and it is not feasible to institute formal con trols, ideology may be important as the vehicle of clan control (Barker 1993). Rather than dictating specific actions or manipulating tangible rewards, clan control occurs when shared understandings define appropriate ways to behave and respond to situations in the group (Kirsch 1997; Ouchi 1979). In order for it to result in positive team outcomes, ideology should motivate behaviors and responses that are likely to be