The role of leadership and its effect on the temporal patterns of global software development teams

Drawing on previous work, the authors explore the role of leaders and their effect on the temporal communication patterns of global software student project teams. Archived group interactions captured during the course of two virtual team projects involving students in the US, Panama, and Turkey were analyzed using a content analysis scheme derived from a collaboration theory that captures communication behavior associated with teams in virtual environments. Results from these analyses suggest that although teams with leaders have many more communications throughout a project, they have similar temporal patterns as compared to teams without leaders. However, the proportion of the different communication behaviors varies considerably between leader and leaderless teams as well as between leaders and their “followers.” More specifically, analysis demonstrated how variation in temporal patterns for leaders and their followers were different from those team members with no leader, thereby bolstering the argument for developing and testing temporal measures in group research.