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Throughout the history of Software Engineering (SE) it has been repeatedly found that the humans involved, i.e. the engineers and developers in addition to other stakeholders, are a key factor in determining project outcomes and success. However, the amount of research that focuses on human aspects has been limited compared to research with technology or process focus. With increasing maturity of the field, interest in agile methods and a growing dissatisfaction with the continued challenges of developing high-quality software on time, the amount of SE research putting human aspect in primary focus has increased.In this paper we argue that a synthesized view of the emerging human-focused SE research is needed and can add value through giving focus, direction and help identify gaps. Taking cues from the addition of Behavioral Economics as an important part of the area of Economics we propose the term Behavioral Software Engineering (BSE) as an umbrella concept for research that focus on behavioral and social aspects in the work activities of software engineers. We propose that a model based on three units of analysis can give structure and point to concepts that are important for BSE. To add detail to this model we are conducting a systematic review to map out what is currently known. To exemplify the model and the area we here present the results from a subset of the identified concepts.

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In the software engineering industry today, companies primarily conduct their work in teams. To increase organizational productivity, it is thus crucial to know the factors that affect team effectiveness. Two team-related concepts that have gained prominence lately are psychological safety and team norms. Still, few studies exist that explore these in a software engineering context. Therefore, with the aim of extending the knowledge of these concepts, we examined if psychological safety and team norm clarity associate positively with software developers' self-assessed team performance and job satisfaction, two important elements of effectiveness.We collected industry survey data from practitioners (N = 217) in 38 development teams working for five different organizations. The result of multiple linear regression analyses indicates that both psychological safety and team norm clarity predict team members' self-assessed performance and job satisfaction. The findings also suggest that clarity of norms is a stronger (30% and 71% stronger, respectively) predictor than psychological safety.This research highlights the need to examine, in more detail, the relationship between social norms and software development. The findings of this study could serve as an empirical baseline for such, future work.