Investigating the relationship between personalities and agile team climate of software professionals in a telecom company

Context: Previous research found that the performance of a team not only depends on the team personally composition, but also on the interactive effects of team climate. Although investigation on personalities associated with software development has been an active research area over the past decades, there has been very limited research in relation to team climate. Objective: Our study investigates the association between the five factor model personally traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism) and the factors related to team climate (team vision, participative safety, support for innovation and task orientation) within the context of agile teams working in a telecom company. Method: A survey was used to gather data on personally characteristics and team climate perceptions of 43 members from eight agile teams. The data was initially used for correlation analysis; then, regression models were developed for predicting the personally traits related to team climate perception. Results: We observed a statistically significant positive correlation between openness to experience and support for innovation (r = 0.31). Additionally, agreeableness was observed to be positively correlated with overall team climate (r = 0.35). Further, from regression models, we observed that personally traits accounted to less than 15% of the variance in team climate. Conclusion: A person's ability to easily get along with team members (agreeableness) has a significant positive influence on the perceived level of team climate. Results from our regression analysis suggest that further data may be needed, and/or there are other human factors, in addition to personally traits, that should also be investigated with regard to their relationship with team climate. Overall, the relationships identified in our study are likely to be applicable to organizations within the telecommunications domain that use scrum methodology for software development.