Social and human factors are relevant aspects for software project management because of their direct relationship with people, their interactions, and their skills and experience in the software development process. The influence of these aspects on the productivity of the software development team is evident and key to the success of projects. This article presents a causal diagram to understand the dynamic nature of software development team productivity as affected by the social and human aspects inherent in the process. Under the system dynamics theory, a causal diagram based on a goal-seeking archetype with delays is proposed. The proposed causal diagram is a conceptual model that aims to facilitate software project management, analyzing productivity from the influence of social and human factors in software development teams. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.