RQ 1 — People: Personality, Teams and Decisions

Covers L1a (the technical person, personality, culture, communication, motivation, leadership) and L1b (teams, safety, loafing, decisions). Summaries at SN L1a and SN L1b; the detail is in the People area.

1. Lecture Questions — L1a

1.1 The technical person

  1. CHAOS puts most projects outside their own forecast. Which part of that record is a human-factors problem rather than a technical one, and what is management’s usual answer — with its own failure mode?
  2. Why does managing an engineer by controlling behaviour tend to reduce the value you were trying to get?
  3. Name three elements of the “geek” archetype, and state what the archetype is legitimately used for.
  4. Why is a day interrupted by three meetings not half a day of output? Name the cost.
  5. Give two concrete practices that protect flow, and say why each is a team-level rather than an individual-level move.
  6. Forty years of research found no consistent software-engineering personality. What follows for hiring, and what does not follow?

1.2 Personality models

  1. What exactly does the MBTI claim to measure? State the four preference pairs.
  2. ISFJ is among the commonest types in the general population at 13.8% and one of the rarest among software engineers at 2%. Give the most defensible explanation for the gap, and state what it does not license you to say about an ISFJ candidate.
  3. A review across 22 years found no association between personality and team performance. Which three common staffing practices does this rule out?
  4. Name the three factors that do predict team performance. What do all three have in common from a manager’s point of view?
  5. A colleague proposes pairing team members by complementary MBTI types. Write the two-sentence reply you would actually give.

1.3 Culture and communication

  1. Hofstede’s dimensions score countries, not people. Give one correct and one incorrect use of a country score.
  2. Name three of the five places cultural difference actually shows up in software work.
  3. In the two-lane example, why did a written procedure resolve a conflict that cultural training would not have?
  4. Constructive and destructive delivery can carry identical content. Name the two moves that decide which one lands, and say which listening failure paraphrasing corrects.
  5. What is the test for whether a meeting should be onsite or remote? Apply it to a retrospective and to a large information-sharing session.

1.4 Motivation

  1. Distinguish motivators from hygiene factors. Why does fixing hygiene not buy extra effort?
  2. Where does salary sit in Herzberg’s scheme, and what does that predict about a raise given to a disengaged engineer?
  3. Engineers rank “identify with the task” first. What is the cheapest managerial action this implies?
  4. State the three needs in self-determination theory, and show how one assignment could address all three.
  5. In expectancy theory, why does one belief at zero make the whole chain zero? Give a software example.
  6. Working with an AI assistant improved motivation on several measures, yet something dropped. What dropped, when, and what should a manager do about it?

1.5 Leadership

  1. List Goleman’s six styles with one situation each.
  2. Why is pacesetting the specific trap for someone arriving from a technical role?
  3. What does “announce the mode and how long it lasts” achieve, and why is it free?
  4. An outage is in progress. Name the style you start with and the style you switch to, and identify the switching moment.
  5. What is the “organisational catalyst” factor, and why is the population it was measured on important?

2. Lecture Questions — L1b

2.1 What a team costs

  1. Define a team in one sentence, and identify which part of the definition creates the cost.
  2. State Steiner’s equation. Which term can a manager influence?
  3. Distinguish motivation losses from coordination losses, and give a software example of each.
  4. Two, three and eight people carry 1, 3 and 28 links. What does this imply about adding a person mid-project?
  5. Give a test for whether a piece of work needs a team at all.
  6. What does “a queue with a meeting” mean, and how would you recognise one?

2.2 Measuring a team

  1. Members, leads and product owners gave different answers about the same teams. Why were the members’ figures the least trustworthy?
  2. What practical rule follows about running a team on self-report?
  3. Name the three things that must be settled when a team forms.
  4. Trust grows one way and is rebuilt another. Name both.
  5. What does naming the Tuckman stage out loud actually achieve?
  6. A team reports no disagreement at all in week one. Why is this a warning rather than a good sign, and what should the lead do?
  7. Distance and churn damage different things. Name which damages what, and which one tooling can help.

2.3 Safety and loafing

  1. Define psychological safety. What does it buy first, and what does it buy least?
  2. Why should safety be sold upstairs as “early bad news” rather than as innovation?
  3. Which work-design factor moved safety, and which two did not?
  4. In the largest diversity study, what predicted effectiveness and what did not? What is the correct conclusion?
  5. State the three reasons effort per person falls in a group, and give one countermeasure for each.
  6. Why is identifiability alone insufficient to reduce loafing?
  7. Explain how AI assistance can create a free-rider problem with nobody free-riding.

2.4 Decisions

  1. Define analysis paralysis, and explain why failing to decide is a more common team failure than deciding badly. What makes the question underneath it unanswerable?
  2. Describe the Recognition-Primed Decision model and the role of expectancies. Give two conditions under which a snap judgement can be trusted and two under which it cannot.
  3. Time pressure roughly doubled the blunder rate of weaker chess players but barely moved masters’. What does this imply about deadlines on an inexperienced team?
  4. Three of the five group decision styles are traps rather than options. Name them and say why.
  5. Distinguish consensus from compromise and from unanimity.
  6. Pick one of Pareto analysis, SWOT, cost-benefit or pair-wise comparison. Which decision level earns it, and how do time pressure and experience each change the answer it gives?
  7. What silenced the juniors in the go/no-go example, and what are the chair’s four counter-moves?
  8. Which cognitive biases are actually established in software engineering, and which famous group pathologies are not?
  9. Why does “people trust AI too much” get the reliance problem backwards? What two things should be counted instead?
  10. Name PEAK’s four inputs and its two outputs. Which output do teams skip, and why does that matter later?

3. Reading Questions

The first six follow the original MSD reading assignment for Managing Technical People. The rest cover the evidence the handbook now rests on.

3.1 Pressman, Software Engineering: A Practitioner’s Approach, ch. 24

  1. What does Pressman mean by “push or pull” motivation?
  2. Pressman lists the people, product, process and project as the four Ps. Which of the four does a manager most often neglect, and what goes wrong when they do?
  3. Where do Pressman’s recommendations and Herzberg’s two lists agree, and where do they not?

3.2 Horowitz, “Singing for Themselves” (Computerworld, 2002)

  1. How does the article characterise the “IT prima donna”, and which parts of that description match the geek archetype from the lecture?
  2. What leadership style or styles, as discussed by Goleman, would be counterproductive when dealing with the type of engineer discussed here?
  3. How would Williams (What You Can Learn from the People Who Manage the People Who Write Software) and Glen (Leading Geeks) each recommend managing this developer? Where do the two differ?
  4. The article is trade journalism built on a handful of interviews. What can it be used to support, and what can it not?

3.3 Thite, “Leadership: A Critical Success Factor in IT Project Management” (1999)

  1. What does Thite mean when he states “one should not become a project manager if he/she is not prepared to say no”?
  2. What is the organisational catalyst factor, and how did managers on more successful projects score on it?
  3. Why does it matter that this study collected its data from technical staff rather than from executives?

3.4 Goleman, “Leadership That Gets Results” (2000)

  1. Summarise the six styles in one line each, with the situation that fits.
  2. Which styles does Goleman report as damaging to climate, and under what conditions does he allow them anyway?
  3. On what data are the six styles based, and why should correlations with climate not be read as causal advice?

3.5 McCarthy, “Participative Leadership in Team Formation” (2003)

  1. Looking at McCarthy’s article, in what situation would a “coercive” style be used in team building?
  2. How does participative leadership relate to the autonomy finding — that autonomy, not role clarity, is what moves psychological safety?

3.6 Hofstede country comparison

  1. Using the country comparison tool, look at your home country and Germany. State three ways you can use this information when planning to work with a teammate from Germany, and with a client from Germany. If your home country is Germany, compare it with the United States instead.
  2. Which of your three ways would still be worth doing if the country scores turned out to be wrong? Why?
  3. The scores aggregate workplace values by country. Explain precisely what error you commit if you apply one to the individual you are about to meet.

3.7 Cruz et al. (2015) and Capretz (2003)

  1. What did the mapping study conclude about a consistent software-engineer personality profile, and what follows for how you use the archetype?
  2. Which MBTI types are over- and under-represented among software engineers, and what sample established that?
  3. Capretz suggests personality fit for particular software roles. Why does the later evidence make that recommendation unsafe?

3.8 Beecham et al., “Motivation in Software Engineering” (2008)

  1. What ranked first among what engineers report wanting, and first among de-motivators?
  2. Where do pay and recognition sit relative to purpose, and what does that imply for how you open an assignment?

3.9 Steiner (1966), Tuckman (1965) and Tuckman & Jensen (1977)

  1. State Steiner’s equation and define each term. Which term can a manager influence?
  2. Classify a code review, a bug hunt and a release as additive, disjunctive or conjunctive, and justify each.
  3. A team is in its second week and arguing about approach. Which stage is that, what does the model say a manager should do, and what does it predict happens if the argument is smoothed over instead?
  4. What kinds of groups did Tuckman review, and why does that matter when applying the model to a software team?

3.10 Alami et al. (2024), Buvik & Tkalich (2022), Verwijs & Russo (2024)

  1. Which behaviours does psychological safety move most, and which least? What follows for how you justify it upwards?
  2. Which work-design antecedent was supported, and which two were not?
  3. In the diversity study, what predicted effectiveness and what did not — including the result that went against the authors’ own hypothesis?
  4. All three rely on self-report. Name the specific bias this raises and one way to test around it.
  1. How does Klein’s account of expert decision making differ from a compare-the-options model?
  2. What is Klein’s objection to the heuristics-and-biases programme, and how far does his evidence carry it?
  3. Blink is a trade book reporting other people’s studies. How should it be used in an argument, and how should it not?
  4. What is the Warren Harding error, and what is its software equivalent?

3.12 ’t Hart, “Irving L. Janis’ Victims of Groupthink” (1991)

  1. What is the circularity charge against groupthink?
  2. What is anticipatory compliance, and why does it explain the go/no-go example better than cohesion does?
  3. ’t Hart writes that “bad procedures need not always produce bad results”. What does this imply for how you review a decision?
  4. To what kinds of groups does the review hold groupthink analysis to be applicable, and is a sprint team one of them?

3.13 Hoover, Rosso-Llopart & Taran, Evaluating Project Decisions (2010)

  1. Name PEAK’s four inputs and the question each one forces you to ask.
  2. Why are there two outputs rather than one, and which one do teams skip?
  3. The model does not say what to decide. What does it claim to do instead?
  4. Apply PEAK to a decision from your own project and state the assumed risk explicitly.

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