Building software engineering teams that work: The impact of dominance on group conflict and Performance outcomes

This project is designed to build on theories of team composition and proposes an innovative way of assigning students to teams. Currently, professors are using a variety of team assignment techniques to form software engineering teams. This research believes that a contributing factor to the undesired outcomes (i.e., low performing teams and high levels of conflict) of software engineering teams is that the teams were not formed using ldquorelevant and salientrdquo criteria. To address the relevance issue, we test the impact of problem solving preferences (a sub-set of the MBTI scale) on group conflict and performance. We then test the extent to which the numerical dominance (i.e., salience) of problem solving styles influences conflict and performance. It was found that dominance of problem solving styles is related to negative team outcomes. We conclude by discussing ways in which instructors and team members may minimize negative team outcomes when there is no choice other than forming a team with one dominant problem solving preference.