Complementary and Substitutive Roles of Information Technology in the Relationship between Project Characteristics and Knowledge Integration in Software Teams

Software development requires the assimilation of team members' diverse knowledge, ideas, and skills for innovative solutions. A software team's knowledge integration is affected by project characteristics, such as scale and interdependence, and the team's use of information technology (IT). We examine how contingencies embedded in these dimensions influence team's knowledge integration. We argue and show that IT-use plays either complementary or substitutive role in moderating the impacts of project scale and project interdependence on knowledge integration.