The Evolution of Emotional Displays in Open Source Software Development Teams: An Individual Growth Curve Analysis

Software developers communicate and interact with each other in order to solve complex problems. Such communication often includes emotional displays that have been shown to influence team processes and performance. Yet, little is known about the evolution of team emotional displays. Hence, we investigate a sample of 1121 Open Source Software (OSS) projects from GitHub, using longitudinal data analysis. The results from growth curve analysis shows that the team emotional display decrease over time. This negative linear trend decelerates mid-term as suggested by a positive quadratic trend of time. Such deceleration diminishes toward the end as a negative cubic trend suggests.