  Context: Prior research has established that a small proportion of
individuals dominate team communication during global software development. It
is not known, however, how these members' contributions affect their teams'
knowledge diffusion process, or whether their personality profiles are
responsible for their dominant presence. Objective: We set out to address this
gap through the study of repository artifacts. Method: Artifacts from ten teams
were mined from the IBM Rational Jazz repository. We employed social network
analysis (SNA) to group practitioners into two clusters, Top Members and
Others, based on the numbers of messages they communicated and their engagement
in task changes. SNA metrics (density, in-degree and closeness) were then used
to study practitioners' importance in knowledge diffusion. Thereafter, we
performed psycholinguistic analysis on practitioners' messages using linguistic
dimensions that had been previously correlated with the Big Five personality
profiles. Results: For our sample of 146 practitioners we found that Top
Members occupied critical roles in knowledge diffusion, and demonstrated more
openness to experience than the Others. Additionally, all personality profiles
were represented during teamwork, although openness to experience,
agreeableness and extroversion were particularly evident. However, no specific
personality predicted members' involvement in knowledge diffusion. Conclusion:
Task assignment that promotes highly connected team communication networks may
mitigate tacit knowledge loss in global software teams. Additionally, while
members expressing openness to experience are likely to be particularly driven
to perform, this is not entirely responsible for a global team's success.
