Network Configuration In App Design Teams: The Effects Of Multiplex And Simplex Networks On Performance

With the development of mobile technology,mobile application(App)has become an indispensable part of people's daily life.Due to the high homogeneity of App,fierce competition,ambiguity and variability of user requirements,and low switching costs,enterprises put forward high requirements for App design teams.App design requires the integration of expertise from different fields.The roles involved in a team include analysts,designers,technical experts and project managers,who are interdependent and related in many ways.These ties and processes among team members form team network configuration in complex patterns to integrate expertise and work outputs.However,due to the "multiplexity" of the ties among members,that is,task relationships are inevitably intertwined with social relationships.This may potentially change the nature of interactions,therefore it is urgent to pay attention to the multiplexity and complexity of social network in App design.And we need explore the internal mechanism between team network structure and team performance.This can provide theoretical guidance for improving App design team performance.Based on the theory of network configuration and the view of multiplex network,this study divided social ties into instrumental simplex ties,expressive simplex ties and instrumental-expressive multiplex ties according to the content of ties and whether different types of ties overlap.By configuration approach,individuals at the micro level are aggregated to the team level.So we adopt the centralization of instrumental simplex network,expressive simplex network and instrumental-expressive multiplex network as independent variables.At the same time,we focus on the task-related process--information elaboration and social-related process--similarity perception from the perspective of information processing perspective and social classification perspective.Therefore,the overall framework of this study is established according to the Structure-process-effectiveness framework.By exploring the optimal configuration of different types of network of App design teams,and the mechanism of team knowledge and social process,we can provide theoretical significance for team design and collaboration process in the field of information systems research.We collect data from 63 teams working on a project of app design to test our research hypotheses.Through empirical analysis and test,the following conclusions are drawn:(1)The centralization of instrumental-expressive multiplex network reduces teams' information elaboration and similarity perception;(2)The centralization of instrumental simplex network is beneficial to information elaboration;(3)Team information elaboration positively influences team creativity,efficiency,and satisfaction;(4)Team similarity perception affects team creativity negatively while it affects team satisfaction positively.This paper contributes to the literature in software development by examining the mechanisms via which the configuration of multiplex and simplex network affect team performance of app design.