Perspective-Taking in Software Engineering: A Study on its Relationship to Team Performance

As software engineering (SE) becomes increasingly collaborative and cross-functional, teams must navigate differences in expertise, role priorities, and communication styles. While team diversity is often associated with greater innovation and creativity, it can also lead to misalignment, conflict, and diminished performance. Perspective-taking (PT), the cognitive process of understanding others’ viewpoints, has been studied in other fields as a way to convert diversity into improved team performance outcomes, yet its role in SE remains underexplored. In this work, we address this gap through an empirical study examining how PT operates in SE teams, and how it relates to team performance. We conducted an interview study with 33 software professionals across a range of roles and organizations, and used thematic analysis to identify common patterns in how participants described PT’s relationship to performance outcomes such as team output, team morale, and software quality. Our findings suggest that perspective-taking fosters more motivation and inclusion, and more productive task-based conflict in software engineering, all of which shape how teams reason, deliberate, and deliver. Given that PT can be difficult in practice, we also identify several factors that help overcome barriers to PT, such as psychological safety and open communication. By improving our understanding of how PT contributes to team performance in SE, and how it can be supported, this work advances efforts to create software that better serves diverse users and a more inclusive SE industry.