A Contingent Approach to Facilitating Conflict Resolution in Software Development Outsourcing Projects

Abstract

With the wide spread of IT outsourcing, internal IT personnel have been required to change their roles from system development to organizational change agents such as securing software development outsourcing (SDO) success. Conflict resolution is critical to secure the SDO success, but the understanding of how IT personnel facilitate conflict resolution as change agents is limited. The purpose of this study is to understand the negative impact of conflicts on SDO outcomes and to investigate the moderating effect of IT personnel's conflict resolution facilitation (process facilitation, content facilitation) between conflicts and two SDO outcome dimensions (project efficiency and system effectiveness). In order to test the model, data was collected through a cross-sectional field survey using questionnaires, and a total of 144 SDO projects were used in the final analysis. Research results show that conflicts have a negative impact on both of the SDO outcome dimensions, and the effect of conflict resolution facilitation by IT personnel is contingent on the dimensions of SDO outcomes.