The enhanced reactivity at pentacoordinated silicon is not fully understood. Corriu and coworkers suggested that greater electropositive character at the pentavalent silicon atom may be responsible for its increased reactivity. Preliminary ab initio calculations supported this hypothesis to some degree, but used a small basis set.
A software program for ab initio calculations, Gaussian 86, was used by Dieters and coworkers to compare tetracoordinated silicon and phosphorus to their pentacoordinate analogues. This ab initio approach is used as a supplement to determine why reactivity improves in nucleophilic reactions with pentacoordinated compounds.  For silicon, the 6-31+G* basis set was used because of its pentacoordinated anionic character and for phosphorus, the 6-31G* basis set was used.
Pentacoordinated compounds should theoretically be less electrophilic than tetracoordinated analogues due to steric hindrance and greater electron density from the ligands, yet experimentally show greater reactivity with nucleophiles than their tetracoordinated analogues. Advanced ab initio calculations were performed on series of tetracoordinated and pentacoordinated species to further understand this reactivity phenomenon. Each series varied by degree of fluorination. Bond lengths and charge densities are shown as functions of how many hydride ligands are on the central atoms. For every new hydride, there is one less fluoride.
For silicon and phosphorus bond lengths, charge densities, and Mulliken bond overlap, populations were calculated for tetra and pentacoordinated species by this ab initio approach. Addition of a fluoride ion to tetracoordinated silicon shows an overall average increase of 0.1 electron charge, which is considered insignificant.  In general, bond lengths in trigonal bipyramidal pentacoordinate species are longer than those in tetracoordinate analogues. Si-F bonds and Si-H bonds both increase in length upon pentacoordination and related effects are seen in phosphorus species, but to a lesser degree. The reason for the greater magnitude in bond length change for silicon species over phosphorus species is the increased effective nuclear charge at phosphorus. Therefore, silicon is concluded to be more loosely bound to its ligands.
In addition Dieters and coworkers  show an inverse correlation between bond length and bond overlap for all series. Pentacoordinated species are concluded to be more reactive because of their looser bonds as trigonal-bipyramidal structures.
By calculating the energies for the addition and removal of a fluoride ion in various silicon and phosphorus species, several trends were found. In particular, the tetracoordinated species have much higher energy requirements for ligand removal than do pentacoordinated species. Further, silicon species have lower energy requirements for ligand removal than do phosphorus species, which is an indication of weaker bonds in silicon.