An investigation of factors that impact behavioral outcomes of software engineers

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a set of environmental factors on desired behavioral outcomes of software engineers. The results show that team rotation has a positive direct effect on an individual’s job satisfaction and, therefore, art indirect effect on organizational commitment. The use of structured analysis techniques results in increasing the individual’s perception of role conflict which indirectly decreases organizational commitment. The use of CASE tools, however, helps to reduce role conflict. CASE tool usage also has a dh-ect positive effect on the software engineer’s organizational commitment. The type of work an individual performed had a direct effect on the individual’s perception of how innovative their project tasks were. Software development work resulted in more innovative projects while software enhancement work resulted in less innovative projects. A somewhat surprising result is that the percentage of time spent on development projects tends to result in lower job satisfaction. The mediating variable, innovative projects, reduces role ambiguity and role conflict. More innovative projects also directly increase job satisfaction. Due to these direct affects, increased project innovation has a large indirect effect on organizational commitment. The results show that a relatively small number of environmental factors can explain a significant portion of a software engineers’ perceptions of job satisfaction and organizational commitment. BACKGROUND AND INTRODUCTION Early studies concerned with software engineering performance and productivity found that individual characteristics of software engineers were significantly

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