Psychological Safety and Norm Clarity in Software Engineering Teams

In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still, few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context. Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction, two important elements of effectiveness. We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38 development teams working for five different organizations. The result of multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger (30\% and 71\% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety. This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.Comment: Submitted to CHASE'201

Cyber security fear appeals:unexpectedly complicated

Cyber security researchers are starting to experiment with fear appeals, with a wide variety of designs and reported efficaciousness. This makes it hard to derive recommendations for designing and deploying these interventions. We thus reviewed the wider fear appeal literature to arrive at a set of guidelines to assist cyber security researchers. Our review revealed a degree of dissent about whether or not fear appeals are indeed helpful and advisable. Our review also revealed a wide range of fear appeal experimental designs, in both cyber and other domains, which confirms the need for some standardized guidelines to inform practice in this respect. We propose a protocol for carrying out fear appeal experiments, and we review a sample of cyber security fear appeal studies, via this lens, to provide a snapshot of the current state of play. We hope the proposed experimental protocol will prove helpful to those who wish to engage in future cyber security fear appeal research

Creating “automatic subjects”: corporate wellness and self-tracking

The use of self-tracking (ST) devices has increased dramatically in recent years with enthusiasm from the public as well as public health, healthcare providers and workplaces seeking to instigate behaviour change in populations. Analysis of the ontological principles informing the design and implementation of the Apple Watch and corporate wellness (CW) programmes using ST technologies will suggest that their primary focus is on the capture and control of attention rather than material health outcomes. Health, wellness and happiness have been conflated with productivity which is now deemed to be dependent on the harnessing of libidinal energy as well as physical energy. In this context ST technologies and related CW interventions, have been informed by “emotional design”, neuroscientific and behavioural principles which target the “pre subjective” consciousness of individuals through manipulating their habits and neurological functioning. The paper draws on the work of Bernard Stiegler to suggest framing ST as “industrial temporal objects”, which capture and “short circuit” attention. It will be proposed that a central aim is to “accumulate the consciousnesses” of subjects consistent with the methods of a contemporary “attention economy”. This new logic of accumulation informs the behaviour change strategies of designers of ST devices, and CW initiatives, taking the form of “psychotechnologies” which attempt to reconstruct active subjects as automatic and reactive “nodes” as part of managed networks