Follow the Leader: Technical and Inspirational Leadership in Open Source Software

TL;DR

This study analyzes how communication and community skills influence leader emergence in open source software teams, challenging the idea that technical merit alone determines leadership roles.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive empirical analysis showing communication and community-building skills are key predictors of leadership in OSS virtual teams.

Findings

Communication skills predict leader emergence

Community building skills influence leadership roles

Technical contributions are not the sole factor for recognition

Abstract

We conduct the first comprehensive study of the behavioral factors which predict leader emergence within open source software (OSS) virtual teams. We leverage the full history of developers' interactions with their teammates and projects at github.com between January 2010 and April 2017 (representing about 133 million interactions) to establish that - contrary to a common narrative describing open source as a pure "technical meritocracy" - developers' communication abilities and community building skills are significant predictors of whether they emerge as team leaders. Inspirational communication therefore appears as central to the process of leader emergence in virtual teams, even in a setting like OSS, where technical contributions have often been conceptualized as the sole pathway to gaining community recognition. Those results should be of interest to researchers and practitioners theorizing about OSS in particular and, more generally, leadership in geographically dispersed virtual teams, as well as to online community managers.