The Impact of Multiple Team Membership on Individual Creativity

The problem-solution orientation of software development have made academics to constantly highlight software developers creativity--defined as the generation of solutions to complex, non-trivial problems that are encountered in the different stages of the development process as a leading element in the success of any software development project. However, most of the literature in this area is based on the assumption that software developers work on one project at a time. Yet, in today’s software development organizations, it is increasingly common to have individuals working on multiple projects at the same time. This study presents a research model that describes the impact that the number of projects an individual works on and the differences among those projects have on software developers’ creativity. Data was collected from a Colombian IS consulting company. The study combined self-reported and objective measures. Finally, given that participants are nested within projects, a hierarchical linear modeling analysis (HLM) was used to test the hypotheses.