Search results

We investigated connectivity demands as a work design characteristic and how its different enactments affect interpersonal relationships and outcomes in global work. Work design theory has seen a resurgence over the last decade as both work and the expectations of workers have evolved. Emerging technologies, in particular, have fueled higher levels of autonomy, greater interdependence, and more global collaboration. These trends, in turn, have sparked increasing recognition among scholars of the social characteristics of work design. Building on this burgeoning research, we identify a modern-day social characteristic of work, global connectivity demands, defined as the extent to which workers collaborate with distant colleagues, especially those that span significant time zone differences, thus requiring high levels of interaction across national boundaries. We examine how these demands are enacted by global professionals and what effects they have on outcomes, including relationships. We conducted initial interviews with 13 human resource directors, which confirmed that global professionals face strong pressure to connect and are being expected to communicate frequently with their distant colleagues, work after hours, and make site visits. Our study of 413 global professionals in an engineering firm then found that not all workers conformed to these connectivity demands, and that their choices shaped their interpersonal relationships with distant colleagues. We advance research on connectivity by interweaving it with work design theory to create a more multifaceted view of the role and effects of global connectivity demands. Our findings demonstrate that different enactments of connectivity may have different effects on interpersonal relationships and work outcomes.

Geographically distributed teams are increasingly prevalent in the workplace, and research on distributed teams is ever more available. Despite this increased attention, we still know surprisingly little about how the dynamics of distributed teams differ from those of their collocated counterparts and how existing models of teams apply to this new form of work. For example, although it has been argued that distributed as compared with collocated teams have more severe conflicts that fester longer and resist resolution, few comparative studies investigate dynamics such as conflict in both distributed and collocated teams. In this study, we examine conflict, its antecedents, and its effects on performance in distributed as compared with collocated teams. Our goal is to understand how conflict plays out in distributed and collocated teams, thus providing insight into how existing models of conflict must be augmented to reflect the trend toward distributed work.We report the results of a field study of 43 teams, 22 collocated and 21 distributed, from a large multinational company. As expected, the distributed teams reported more task and interpersonal conflict than did the collocated teams. We found evidence that shared identity moderated the effect of distribution on interpersonal conflict and that shared context moderated the effect of distribution on task conflict. Finally, we found that spontaneous communication played a pivotal role in the relationship between distribution and conflict. First, spontaneous communication was associated with a stronger shared identity and more shared context, our moderating variables. Second, spontaneous communication had a direct moderating effect on the distribution-conflict relationship, mitigating the effect of distribution on both types of conflict. We argue that this effect reflects the role of spontaneous communication in facilitating conflict identification and conflict handling.

Though geographically distributed teams are rapidly increasing in prevalence, empirical research examining the effect of distance on group process has not kept pace. In a study of 24 product development teams located within five companies, we attempt to bridge the gap between research and practice by comparing the amount of affective and task conflict reported in collocated versus geographically distributed teams. We further examine how conflict is impacted by shared team identity, cultural heterogeneity, and reliance on technology for communication. As hypothesized, shared team identity was associated with less task conflict within distributed, but not collocated teams. Similar effects were found for affective conflict, suggesting that a shared identity may help distributed teams to better manage conflict. Our results also suggest more task conflict on teams that rely heavily on technology to mediate their communications. In examining performance, we found some support for our hypothesis that conflict would be more detrimental for distributed than collocated teams.

This research examines the process through which globally distributed work teams attempt to adapt to cross-cultural differences while being constrained by the local contexts in which they are embedded. We conducted an in-depth field study of nine software development teams that included 132 ethnographic initial interviews, periods of team observation, 19 follow-up interviews, and team meetings. Inductive analysis of the data led us to develop an embedded model of cultural adaptation in global teams to describe the process we observed as teams attempted to cope with important differences in interpersonal communication styles, preferred approaches to organizational control and authority relations, and work-related knowledge and problem-solving approaches. We show how local embeddedness and interdependence across sites together drive cultural adaptation dialectics as actors attempt to resolve rippling tensions within and across nested social structures. The model of cultural adaptation that we developed as an outcome of our research challenges literature that assumes adaptation can be contained within a team and is distinctive in incorporating a dynamic systems view of culture. We build on and develop theory concerning multilevel structuration dynamics. Our work may have implications for other types of boundary-spanning collaborations such as strategic alliances and multinational corporations.

Previous research describes significant benefits from coworker familiarity but has largely assumed proximity and that familiarity accrues simply with the passage of time. Based on a qualitative study of 164 workers on globally distributed teams, we propose that relationships transform as a result of situated coworker familiarity established when people are collocated in a shared space for an extended period of time. Site visits play a pivotal role in enabling coworkers to become more familiar with one another's communication and work styles, capabilities and interests, personalities, work and social roles, and the cultural context in which they are embedded, thus transforming their relationships. After returning home, situated familiarity fosters behaviors reflecting closer ties, which then reinforce those bonds, suggesting that the situated nature of site visits transforms work relationships between distant coworkers in enduring ways. We contribute grounded theory about how situated coworker familiarity comes about and how coworker relationships transform as a result, particularly when workers spend most of their time apart.

The bulk of our understanding of teams is based on traditional teams in which all members are collocated and communicate face to face. However, geographically distributed teams, whose members are not collocated and must often communicate via technology, are growing in prevalence. Studies from the field are beginning to suggest that geographically distributed teams operate differently and experience different outcomes than traditional teams. For example, empirical studies suggest that distributed teams experience high levels of conflict. These empirical studies offer rich and valuable descriptions of this conflict, but they do not systematically identify the mechanisms by which conflict is engendered in distributed teams. In this paper, we develop a theory-based explanation of how geographical distribution provokes team-level conflict. We do so by considering the two characteristics that distinguish distributed teams from traditional ones: Namely, we examine how being distant from one's team members and relying on technology to mediate communication and collaborative work impacts team members. Our analysis identifies antecedents to conflict that are unique to distributed teams. We predict that conflict of all types (task, affective, and process) will be detrimental to the performance of distributed teams, a result that is contrary to much research on traditional teams. We also investigate conflict as a dynamic process to determine how teams might mitigate these negative impacts over time.

Prior studies that examine how new expertise becomes integrated into organizations have shown that different occupations work to legitimate their new expertise to develop credibility and deference from other organizational groups. In this study, we similarly examine the work that an expert occupation did to legitimate their expertise; however, in this case, they were legitimating practices that they actually considered illegitimate. We report findings from our 20-month ethnography of data analysts at a financial technology company to explain this process. We show that the company had structured data analytics in ways similar to Bechky's idea of a captive occupation: They were dependent on their collaborators' cooperation to demonstrate the value of data analytics and accomplish their work. The data analysts constantly encountered or were asked to provide what they deemed to be illegitimate data analysis practices such as hacking, peeking, and poor experimental design. In response, they sometimes resisted but more often reconciled themselves to the requests. Notably, they also explicitly lowered their stated standards and then worked to legitimate those now illegitimate versions of their expert practices through standardization, technology platforms, and evangelizing. Our findings articulate the relationship between captive occupations and conditions wherein experts work to legitimate what they consider illegitimate practices.

The current study examines cross-cultural differences in norms for meetings. Following Eisenhardt, we used a broad set of conceptual dimensions for analyzing meetings as a genre of organizational communication (Yates & Orlikowski) to guide a within- and cross-case analysis of meetings in two cultures. Our goal was to discover the possible existence of patterns and interpretations within cultures, and contrasts and explanations across cultures. Data from three different data sets were analyzed encompassing a total of 10 teams each with German and U.S. American subgroups. Findings show that Germans and U.S. Americans have different expectations and practices concerning the purpose, content, structure, and timing of meetings, and the roles of participants. The underlying meaning of these differences is explored. Theoretical and practical contributions of the work are discussed.

Technologies are changing at a rapid pace and in unpredictable ways. The scale of their impact is also far-reaching. Technologies such as artificial intelligence, data analytics, robotics, digital platforms, social media, blockchain, and 3-D printing affect many parts of the organization simultaneously, enabling new interdependencies within and between units and with actors that many organizations have typically considered to be outside their boundaries. Consequently, today's emerging technologies have the potential to fundamentally shape all aspects of organizing. This article introduces the special issue "Emerging Technologies and Organizing." We treat these new technologies as "emerging" because their uses and effects are still varied and have yet to stabilize around a recognizable set of patterns and because the technologies themselves are, by design, always changing and adapting. To theorize the relationship between emerging technologies and organizing, we draw on relational thinking in philosophy and sociology to develop a relational perspective on emerging technologies. Our goal in doing so is to create a new way for organizational scholars to incorporate the ever-increasing role of technology in their theorizing of key organizational processes and phenomena. By developing a relational perspective that treats emerging technologies not as stable entities, but as a set of evolving relations, we provide a novel way for organizational scholars to account for the role of technology in their topics of interest. We sketch the outlines of this relational perspective on emerging technologies and discuss the implications it has for what organizational scholars study and how we study it.