Distributed Collaboration and Telework in Organizations and Networks

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    The Influence of Psychological Safety and Personality on Technology Acceptance of Team-Based Technology in Global Virtual Teams
    (2022-01-04) Cardon, Peter; Fleischmann, Carolin; Aritz, Jolanta; Ma, Haibing; Springer, Ann; Springer, Scott
    Collaboration platforms for teams, such as Slack, are increasingly used in virtual teams. Conventional wisdom suggests attitudes about adopting these types of platforms is primarily driven by their affordances. Our project emerged from the premise that psychological safety and personality traits can also significantly influence attitudes related to technology adoption. This research of roughly 300 global virtual teams showed that psychological safety influences views of collaboration platforms in terms of performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and hedonic motivation. In addition, this research showed that personality traits influence views of collaboration platforms. These findings about psychological safety and personality traits suggest a team-development approach is an integral component of the technology adoption process. Recommendations for future research are provided.
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    Telework as a Means of Organizational Identity Change: Investigating Japanese Collectivist Culture in an ICT Company
    (2022-01-04) Kimata, Akira; Takahashi, Masayasu
    Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous companies have implemented telework to balance business continuity with employees’ safety. However, telework was not a widespread phenomenon in Japan until recently. Why is a geographically decentralized workstyle not as widespread in Japan as in other nations? In a previous study, based on collected samples from 529 Japanese companies, we used statistical analyses and clarified that the communication style aligned with Japanese collectivism seriously hinders telework. The present study used qualitative analysis to investigate how the communication style associated with Japanese collectivist culture hinders the introduction of telework. Finally, we concluded that if a non-Western cultural company introduces telework, it should remove the negative aspects of the communication style associated with collectivist culture to bring about organizational change that leads to a new organizational identity.
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    Team Knowledge Networks, Task Dependencies and Coordination: Preliminary Findings from Software Teams
    (2022-01-04) Espinosa, J. Alberto; Clark, Mark; Nordbäck, Emma
    Today’s work increasingly involves teams with fluid boundaries, and members working on multiple projects at a time. To understand how work is effectively coordinated in such complex organizations, we focus on the role of a company’s task dependency network. We integrate three research streams – coordination, team knowledge and social networks to conceptualize multiteam work as a large collaboration with members in multiple functional roles and areas of expertise, with complex task dependency relationships, operating as a coherent and well-coordinated knowledge network. Through this integration and empirical test of associated hypotheses with data from a European software company, our study illustrates how to represent multiple relationships in one complex multiplex network. This extends our understanding of how the various knowledge relationships and individual attribute differences influence the effective coordination in collaborative software development work. We address the concepts of awareness and shared familiarity and how they affect coordination, while keeping our focus on illustrating the power of network analytics to gain nuanced insights into the drivers of effective coordination.
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    Prototyping a Conversational Agent for AI-Supported Ideation in Organizational Creativity Processes
    (2022-01-04) Debowski, Nicole; Tavanapour, Navid; Bittner, Eva
    In this study, we present design guidelines (DGs) for the development and improvement of a virtual collaborator (VC) for Design Thinking (DT). Based on interviews in an ex ante study, we designed a first prototype of a VC. From an ex post evaluation using focus group discussions, we derive strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the VC. Strengths of the VC are good structure, giving inspiration as well as pace and accuracy. Opportunities are to set level of detail, give a more humane representation, and linking search with other DT phases. Weaknesses are not always suitable content and the VC being rather suitable for research phases as well as one-sided communication and no empathy. Threats are questionable search parameters and too narrow focus of search. We then derived DGs for further improvement of the VC, addressing the weaknesses, threats and ideas from participants.
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    Gender Heterogeneity in the Effect of Telework on Labor Market Outcomes during the COVID-19 Pandemic
    (2022-01-04) Hou, Jingbo; Liang, Chen; Chen, Pei-Yu; Gu, Bin
    With the massive COVID-19 lockdown, teleworkability, i.e., the feasibility of telework, plays an important role in determining whether workers can maintain productivity and keep their jobs. However, the impact of teleworkability is likely to be heterogeneous, varying by worker characteristics, such as gender and childcare constraints. This study examines the heterogeneous impact of teleworkability on labor market outcomes (including unemployment, work absence, and layoff). Using stay-at-home order as a measure of labor market disruption, we find that teleworkability offsets the increase in unemployment due to the disruption of COVID-19 by 20%, that in work absence by 28%, and that in layoff by 26%. Specifically, the positive effect of teleworkability is i) stronger for females than males; ii) stronger for females with kids than their male counterparts as well as those without kids. Our study contributes to the emerging literature on gender inequality by underscoring the nuanced impact of teleworkability.
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    Enabling Knowledge Broker Analysis through Actor Clusters in Organizational Structures in Enterprise Social Media
    (2022-01-04) Leppälä, Mia; Huhtamäki, Jukka
    Knowledge brokers serve as facilitators of knowledge sharing. The extant literature calls for nuanced analyses of different organizational structures as the spaces knowledge brokers operate in. Our interest lies in formal, semiformal, and informal organizational network structures and in how knowledge brokers are positioned in them. In this paper, we outline a collaborative analysis method, with researchers from different disciplines working together in data sprints. The benefit of this process is that it enables analyzing large organizational networks with deep insights. Amplifying social network analysis with field knowledge offers a deeper understanding of the connections in the network. This paper describes the analysis process and proposes interdisciplinary data processing techniques. We applied the proposed method using an extensive empirical data set that includes intraorganizational social media interactions between employees in a global organization. Our analysis transforms enterprise social media data into a network model that describes an organization’s social structure.
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    Introduction to the Minitrack on Distributed Collaboration and Telework in Organizations and Networks
    (2022-01-04) Cogburn, Derrick; Espinosa, J. Alberto; Clark, Mark; Nordbäck, Emma