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It is often the case that ideal sociotechnical systems (STS) profiles cannot be implemented. Consequently, STS designers often must decide which among the many design features in an ideal STS profile to implement. This paper presents a theory for understanding the dependencies among ideal design features. With such a theory, if choices among ideal features must be made, the relative impact of choosing not to implement one ideal feature on the effectiveness of other ideal features will be better understood. Several propositions are offered based on the theory, including a proposal that not all ideal design features are needed since some can compensate for others. The theory was applied to manufacturing organizations and tested using data obtained from site visits to 86 companies. The results indicated that the theory significantly differentiated higher from lower performing manufacturing organizations. The theory has been embodied in a computational modeling software program that has been used by over 50 industrial sites in the United States. Implications of such a theory for STS practice as well as furthering STS theory-building are discussed.

Information utilization was examined among 90 social service decision makers. Results indicated that propensity to use a particular type of information is relatively independent of the propensity to use a particular source from which the information is obtained. Moreover, the information type used by a decision maker is predicted in part by the type of decision needing to be made. In contrast, use of a particular source is related to the decision maker's role. Suggestions for evaluators concerned with utilization of their information as well as for researchers developing theories of information use are offered.

Increasingly, geographically dispersed teams are relying exclusively on sophisticated information and communication technologies (ICTs) to coordinate their knowledge. Current research argues that the reliance on the technology (versus face-to-face) for communication may inhibit geographically distributed team performance. In contrast, we argue that previous research associates negative performance effects with the level or degree of exclusive reliance on ICT without regard to the specific form or ways in which team members use ICT. We hypothesize that teams will be more successful when they use ICT to specifically facilitate the situational awareness needs created by their teams' composition and task. We studied 54 geographically dispersed teams that all relied exclusively on ICT (with minimal to no face-to-face interactions) for coordination in order to control for the effect of the level of reliance on ICTs. Our multi-source/multi-method study demonstrates that the form of use can have a positive association with team performance even in teams relying exclusively on ICT depending on the team composition and nature of task being performed. Our findings suggest that, instead of assuming that technology reliance negatively impacts team performance, researchers studying distributed teams should separate the level of reliance (degree of use) from form of reliance (type of use) on ICT.