Motivating open source software developers: influence of transformational and transactional leaderships

Authors:
Yan Li;Chuan-Hoo Tan;Hock-Hai Teo;A. Talib Mattar
Affiliations:
National University of Singapore, Singapore;National University of Singapore, Singapore;National University of Singapore, Singapore;National University of Singapore, Singapore
Venue:
Proceedings of the 2006 ACM SIGMIS CPR conference on computer personnel research: Forty four years of computer personnel research: achievements, challenges & the future
Year:
2006

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Abstract

Open Source Software (OSS) is developed by geographically distributed unpaid programmers. The success of such a seemingly chaotic OSS project will largely depend on how the project leader organizes and motivates the developers to contribute. Grounded on leadership and motivation theories, we proposed and tested a research model that seeks to explain the behavioral effects of a leader on the developers' motivation to contribute. Survey data collected from 118 OSS developers on Sourceforge.net was used to test the research model. The results indicate that leaders' transformational leadership is positively related to developers' intrinsic motivation and leaders' active management by exception, a form of transactional leadership, is positively related to developers' extrinsic motivation.