The Impact of Ideology Misfit on Open Source Software Communities and Companies1
Authors: Daniel, Sherae L.; Maruping, Likoebe M.; Cataldo, Marcelo; Herbsleb, Jim
Journal: MIS Quarterly (2018)
<jats:p>Corporate involvement in open source software (OSS) communities has increased substantially in recent years. Often this takes the form of company employees devoting their time to contribute code to the efforts of projects in these communities. Ideology has traditionally served to motivate, coordinate, and guide volunteer contributions to OSS communities. As employees represent an increasing proportion of the participants in OSS communities, the role of OSS ideology in guiding their commitment and code contributions is unknown. In this research, we argue that OSS ideology misfit has important implications for companies and the OSS communities to which their employees contribute, since their engagement in such communities is not necessarily voluntary. We conceptualize two different types of misfit: OSS ideology under-fit, whereby an employee embraces an OSS ideology more than their coworkers or OSS community do, and OSS ideology over-fit, whereby an employee perceives that their coworkers or OSS community embrace the OSS ideology more strongly than the employee does. To develop a set of hypotheses about the implications of these two types of misfit for employee commitment to…