Team Climate, Team Cognition, Team Intuition, and Software Quality: The Moderating Role of Project Complexity

Teams represent a prevailing approach to getting work done in today’s hypercompetitive business environment. Although there is a widely held assumption that team-related capabilities determine the success of new product development projects, empirical research on team capabilities is scant. Based on the resource-based view of the firm, organizational learning theory, and situated learning theory, this study investigates the interrelationships among team climate, two information-processing capabilities (i.e., team cognition and team intuition), and software quality. As well, this study explores the moderating effect of project complexity between the information-processing capabilities and the quality of the software. In studying the data from 139 software development projects using the partial least squares structural equation modeling methods, we found that team climate has a direct influence on team cognition. Moreover, the findings showed that team cognition was positively related to the quality of the software product in general; in particular, this relationship was found to be far more significant when project complexity was used as a moderator. This finding indicates that the software development team’s ability to process information logically in order to interpret situations effectively allows the team to launch superior software products when unexpected and undesirable events make a project complicated and challenging to perform. In particular, managers should encourage teams to benefit from new ideas and make collective efforts for reaching goals. Managers should also enable teams to specialize in their tasks and improve their collective information-processing capabilities.