The Teamwork Process Antecedents (TPA) questionnaire: developing and validating a comprehensive measure for assessing antecedents of teamwork process quality

Abstract

Context Most models of teamwork describe team behavior and effectiveness using an Input-Process-Output approach. In software engineering, the use of such models has focused on understanding and operationalizing the Process-Output components while less research effort has been applied to define and measure the Input-Process component.

Objective To develop and validate a measure of teamwork process antecedents (inputs) that addresses specific characteristics of software teams in industrial practice.

Method First, we reviewed the group work literature, identified and integrated previously described antecedents of work group process, and developed a measure to tap those antecedents. This measure is operationalized in the Teamwork Process Antecedents (TPA) questionnaire, which we then validated with 375 Brazilian software engineers from 100 companies, using exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.

Results We created a survey to operationalize two multidimensional antecedents of teamwork process, Team Structure and Team Composition, based on well-established models from the literature on work teams. We tailored the response items to the software engineering context to increase construct face validity. We reached a parsimonious set of five dimensions for Team Composition (16 response items) and four dimensions for Team Structure (11 response items). Our results show that our measure of TPA has excellent internal reliability and convergent and discriminant validity.

Conclusions We created a novel measure of antecedents of teamwork process tailored to software teams, that captures the perception of team members about the adequacy of team composition and structure to achieve team goals. Further, we present the development of the TPA measure in the form of a guideline that may be used in the construction of other measurement instruments in empirical software engineering research. We believe both results are important contributions of this work.