ABSTRACT
Team work is the norm in major development projects and industry is continually striving to improve team effectiveness. Researchers have established that teams with high levels of social sensitivity tend to perform well when completing a variety of specific collaborative tasks. Social sensitivity is the personal ability to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others, and it is reliably measurable. However, the tasks in recent research have been primarily short term, requiring only hours to finish, whereas major project teams work together for longer durations and on complex tasks. Our claim is that, social sensitivity can be a key component in predicting the performance of teams that carry out major projects. Our goal is to determine if previous research, which was not focused on students or professionals in scientific or technical fields, is germane for people in computing disciplines. This paper reports the results from an empirical study that investigates whether social sensitivity is correlated with the performance of student teams on large semester-long projects. The overall result supports our claim that the team social sensitivity is highly correlated with successful team performance. It suggests, therefore, that educators in computer-related disciplines, as well as computer professionals in the workforce, should take the concept of social sensitivity seriously as an aid or obstacle to productivity.
- Bacon, D.R., Stewart, K.A., and Silver, W.S. 1999. Lessons from the Best and Worst Student Team Experiences: How a Teacher Can Make the Difference. Journal of Management Education. 23, 467--488.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Baron-Cohen, S., Bolton, P., Wheelwright, S., Scahill, V., Short, L., Mead, G., and Smith, A. 1998. Autism occurs more often in families of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians. Autism. 2, 296--301.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Baron-Cohen, S., Wheelwright, S., Hill, J., Raste, Y., and Plumb, I. 2001. The 'Reading the Mind in the Eyes' Test Revised Version: A Study with Normal Adults, and Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High-functioning Autism. Child Journal of Psychology and Psychiatry, 42, 2, 241--251,.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Barrick, M.R., Stewart, G.L., Neubert, M.J., and Mount, M.K. 1998. Relating Member Ability and Personality to Work-Team Processes and Team Effectiveness. Journal of Applied Pshchology. 83, 377--391.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Basili, V.R., Caldiera, G., and Rombach, H.D. 1994. The Goal Question Metric Approach. Technical Report. Department of Computer Science, University of Maryland.Google Scholar
- Begel, A. and Simon, B. 2008. Struggles of new college graduates in their first software development job. In Proceedings of the 39th SIGCSE technical symposium on Computer science education (Portland, OR, USA, 2008). ACM. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Belbin, M. 1993. Team Roles at Work. Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford.Google Scholar
- Beranek, G., Zuser, W., and Grechenig, T. 2005. Functional Group Roles in Software Engineering Teams. In HSSE'05 (St. Louis Missouri USA, May 2005), 1--5. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bradley, J.H. and Hebert, F.J. 1997. The effect of personality type on team performance. Journal of Management Development. 16, 5, 337--353.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Chan, C.L., Jiang, J.J., and Klein, G. 2008. Team Task Skills as a Facilitator for Application and Development Skills. IEEE Transactions On Engineering Management. 55, 3 (Aug. 2008), 434--441.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Cohen, S.G. and Bailey, D.E. 1997. What Makes Teams Work: Group Effectiveness Research from the Shop Floor to the Executive Suite. Journal of Management. 23, 3, 239--290.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Dubinsky, Y. and Hazzan, O. 2006. Using Roles Scheme to Derive Software Project Metrics. Journal of Systems Architecture. 52, 11 (Nov. 2006), 693--699. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Dukerich, J.M. 2002. Leadership, team building, and team member characteristics in high performance project teams. Engineering Management Journal. Dec. 2002.Google Scholar
- Faraj, S. and Sproull, L. 2000. Coordinating expertise in software development teams. Management Science. 46, 12 (De. 2000), 1554--1568. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Felder, R. and Brent, R.. 2001. Effective strategies for cooperative learning. Journal of Cooperation & Collaboration in College Teaching. 10, 69--75.Google Scholar
- Gorla, N. and Wah Lam, Y. 2004. Who Should Work With Whom? 2004. Communications of the ACM. 47, 6 (Jun. 2004), 79--82. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Greenspan, S. 1981. Defining childhood social competence. Advances in Special Education. 3, 1--39.Google Scholar
- Hallerback, M.U., Lugnegard, T., Hjarthag, F., and Gillberg. C. 2009. Cognitive neuropsychiatry, 14 (Mar. 2009), 127--143.Google Scholar
- Ikonen, M. and Kurhila, J. 2009. Discovering High-Impact Success Factors in Capstone Software Projects. In SIGITE'09 (Fairfax, Virginia, USA, October 2009), 235--244. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Langan-Fox, J., Cooper, C.L., and Klimoski, R.J. Research Companion to theDysfunctional Workplace: Management Challenges and Symptoms (New Horizons in Management). Edward Elgar Publishing. Camberly, UK.Google Scholar
- Lewis, T.S. and Smith, W.J. 2008. Creating High Performing Software Engineering Teams: The Impact of Problem Solving Style Dominance On Group Conflict and Performance. 24, 2, 121--130. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Mathieu, J.E., Heffner, T.S., Goodwin, G.F., Salas, E., and Cannon-Bowers, J.A. 2000. The Influence of Shared Mental Models on Team Process and Performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85, 2 (Apr. 2000), 273--283.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mersino, A. 2007. Emotional Intelligence for Project Managers. American Management Association, New York. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Pedrini, D.T. and Pedrini, B.C. Vineland Social Maturity Scale Profile. Retrieved August 18, 2011 from http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED079342.pdf.Google Scholar
- Pieterse, V., Kourie, D., and Sonnekus, I. 2006. Software Engineering Team Diversity and Performance. In Proceedings of annual SAICSIT 204 (Somerset West South Africa 2006), 180--186. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Salovey, P. and Mayer, J.D. 1990. Emotional Intelligence. Imagination, Cognition, and Personality. 9, 3, 185--211.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Shen, S., Prior, S.D., White, A.S., and Karamanoglu, M. 2007. Using Personality Type Differences to Form Engineering Design Teams. Engineering Education. 2, 2, 54--66.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Smarkusky, D., Dempsey, r., Ludka, J., and de Quillettes, F. 2005. In SIGCSE '05 (St. Louis, Missouri USA, Feb. 2005).Google Scholar
- Sternberg, R.J. Handbook of intelligence, 2nd ed. 2000. (359--379). Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
- Strang, R. 1930. Measures of Social Intelligence, American Journal of Sociology, 36, 2, 263--269.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Thorndike, R.L. and Stein, S. 1937. An Evaluation of the Attempts to Measure Social Intelligence. Psychological Bulletin, 34, 5 (May 1937), 275--284.Google ScholarCross Ref
- West, M.A. 2004. Effective teamwork: practical lessons from organizational research. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 9--14.Google Scholar
- Woolley, A.W., Chabris, C.F., Pentland, A., Hashmi, N., and Malone,T.W. 2010. Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups. Science 2010. ePub ahead of print doi10.1126/science.1193147Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Social sensitivity and classroom team projects: an empirical investigation
Recommendations
Does Social Sensitivity Impact Virtual Teams?
SIGCSE '19: Proceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science EducationWorking effectively as part of a team is an incredibly important skill to learn. Most jobs require interacting and working with others and the outcome of a team project relies on the processes of the group members. Naturally, a positive team experience ...
Social sensitivity correlations with the effectiveness of team process performance: an empirical study
ICER '12: Proceedings of the ninth annual international conference on International computing education researchTeamwork is essential in industry and a university is an excellent place to assess which skills are important and for students to practice those skills. A positive teamwork experience can also improve student learning outcomes. Prior research has ...
"Personal Social Dashboard": A Tool for Measuring Your Social Engagement Effectiveness in the Enterprise
UMAP '17: Proceedings of the 25th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and PersonalizationSocial media platforms have become popular in many enterprises. Employees build their social eminence by effectively engaging on these platforms. Becoming socially eminent in the organization is a personal journey and many employees need guidance to ...
Comments