Online discussion communities play an important role in the development of relationships and the transfer of knowledge within and across organizations. Their underlying technologies enhance these processes by providing infrastructures through which group-based communication can occur. Community administrators often make decisions about technologies with the goal of enhancing the user experience, but the impact of such decisions on how a community develops must also be considered. To shed light on this complex and under-researched phenomenon, we offer a model of key latent constructs influenced by technology choices and possible causal paths by which they have dynamic effects on communities. Two important community characteristics that can be impacted are community size (number of members) and community resilience (membership that is willing to remain involved with the community in spite of variability and change in the topics discussed). To model community development, we build on attraction–selection–attrition (ASA) theory, introducing two new concepts: participation costs (how much time and effort are required to engage with content provided in a community) and topic consistency cues (how strongly a community signals that topics that may appear in the future will be consistent with what it has hosted in the past). We use the proposed ASA theory of online communities (OCASA) to develop a simulation model of community size and resilience that affirms some conventional wisdom and also has novel and counterintuitive implications. Analysis of the model leads to testable new propositions about the causal paths by which technology choices affect the emergence of community size and community resilience, and associated implications for community sustainability.
Increasingly, online discussion communities are used to support activities ranging from software development to political campaigns. An important feature of an online discussion community is its content boundaries, which are individual perceptions of what materials and discussions are part of the community and what are not, and how that community is related to others within a larger system. Yet in spite of its importance, many community infrastructures allow individual participants to reshape content boundaries by simultaneously associating their contributions with multiple online discussion communities. This reshaping behavior is a controversial aspect of the creation and management of many types of online discussion communities. On one hand, many communities explicitly discourage boundary reshaping behaviors in their frequently asked questions or termsof- use document. On the other hand, community infrastructures continue to allow such reshaping behaviors. To explain this controversy, we theorize how the extent of boundary reshaping in an online discussion community has simultaneously positive and negative effects on its member dynamics and responsiveness. We test predictions about the conflicting effects of reshaping behaviors with 60 months of longitudinal data from 140 USENET newsgroups, focusing on cross-posting activities as a form of reshaping behavior. Empirical results are consistent with the proposed hypotheses that reshaping behaviors within a discussion community affect member dynamics and community responsiveness in both positive and negative ways. Taken together, the findings highlight the boundary-related design challenges faced by managers seeking to support ongoing activity within online discussion communities.
Online discussion communities have become a widely used medium for interaction, enabling conversations across a broad range of topics and contexts. Their success, however, depends on participants' willingness to invest their time and attention in the absence of formal role and control structures. Why, then, would individuals choose to return repeatedly to a particular community and engage in the various behaviors that are necessary to keep conversation within the community going? Some studies of online communities argue that individuals are driven by self-interest, while others emphasize more altruistic motivations. To get beyond these inconsistent explanations, we offer a model that brings dissimilar rationales into a single conceptual framework and shows the validity of each rationale in explaining different online behaviors. Drawing on typologies of organizational commitment, we argue that members may have psychological bonds to a particular online community based on (a) need, (b) affect, and/or (c) obligation. We develop hypotheses that explain how each form of commitment to a community affects the likelihood that a member will engage in particular behaviors (reading threads, posting replies, moderating the discussion). Our results indicate that each form of community commitment has a unique impact on each behavior, with need-based commitment predicting thread reading, affect-based commitment predicting reply posting and moderating behaviors, and obligation-based commitment predicting only moderating behavior. Researchers seeking to understand how discussion-based communities function will benefit from this more precise theorizing of how each form of member commitment relates to different kinds of online behaviors. Community managers who seek to encourage particular behaviors may use our results to target the underlying form of commitment most likely to encourage the activities they wish to promote.
Firms need to balance efficiency gains obtained through exploiting existing knowledge assets with long-term competitive viability achieved through exploring new knowledge resources. Because the use of knowledge management systems (KMSs) continues to expand, understanding how these systems affect exploration and exploitation practices at the individual level is important to advance both knowledge management theory and practice. This study reports the results of a multi-industry survey investigating how psychological climate and KMS access influence solution reuse (exploitation) and solution innovation (exploration) in the context of technical support work. Our results show that KMS access does not directly determine solution innovation or solution reuse. Instead, KMS access strengthens the positive relationship between a climate for innovation and solution innovation and reverses the positive relationship between a climate for autonomy and solution innovation. The implications for knowledge management research and practice are discussed.
In software development, team-based work structures are commonly used to accomplish complex projects. Software project teams must be able to utilize the expertise and knowledge of participants without overwhelming individual members. To efficiently leverage individuals' knowledge and expertise, software project teams develop team cognition structures that facilitate their knowledge activities. This study focuses on the emergence and evolution of team cognition in software project teams, and examines how communication activity and team diversity impact the formation of these structures. A longitudinal study was conducted of 51 database development teams. The results suggest that some forms of communication and team diversity affect the formation of team cognition. Frequency of meetings and phone calls were positively related to the formation of team cognition, while e-mail use had no effect. Gender diversity had a strong and positive effect on the development of team cognition and the effect remained stable over time. Implications for the practical potential and limitations of purposive team construction as a strategy for improving software development team performance are discussed.
Although it has been argued that knowledge is an important organizational resource, little research has investigated where individuals go to search for information or knowledge. Prior work has investigated sources in isolation, but in an organizational setting, sources are encountered as an open portfolio instead of in isolation. It is important to understand how individuals perceive the wide array of sources available to them and how those perceptions affect their use of different types of sources. Building on prior work, this research looks at factors underlying the selection of sources that require direct interpersonal contact (relational sources) and those that do not (nonrelational sources) and explores factors that differentially affect the use of these types of sources. A sample of 204 working professionals recruited from graduate business studies was used to test hypotheses regarding the effects of accessibility and quality, as well as comparisons and trade-offs between relational and nonrelational sources. Consistent with prior work, source accessibility and quality significantly affect usage of a source. This relationship, however, is moderated by the type of source with accessibility having less effect on the use of relational sources. Furthermore, use of each type of source was also affected by the perceived accessibility and quality of alternative types of sources. Together these results highlight the importance of simultaneously considering the relational and nonrelational sources available to individuals. These results also have implications for the design and implementation of systems for managing information and knowledge assets.
In a world where information technology is both important and imperfect, organizations and individuals are faced with the ongoing challenge of determining how to use complex, fragile systems in dynamic contexts to achieve reliable outcomes. While reliability is a central concern of information systems practitioners at many levels, there has been limited consideration in information systems scholarship of how firms and individuals create, manage, and use technology to attain reliability. We propose that examining how individuals and organizations use information systems to reliably perform work will increase both the richness and relevance of IS research. Drawing from studies of individual and organizational cognition, we examine the concept of mindfulness as a theoretical foundation for explaining efforts to achieve individual and organizational reliability in the face of complex technologies and surprising environments. We then consider a variety of implications of mindfulness theories of reliability in the form of alternative interpretations of existing knowledge and new directions for inquiry in the areas of IS operations, design, and management.
This study uses a metatriangulation approach to explore the relationships between power and information technology impacts, development or deployment, and management or use in a sample of 82 articles from 12 management and MIS journals published between 1980 and 1999. We explore the multiple paradigms underlying this research by applying two sets of lenses to examine the major findings from our sample. The technological imperative, organizational imperative, and emergent perspectives (Markus and Robey 1988) are used as one set of lenses to better understand researchers' views regarding the causal structure between IT and organizational power. A second set of lenses, which includes the rational, pluralist, interpretive, and radical perspectives (Bradshaw-Camball and Murray 1991), is used to focus on researchers' views of the role of power and different IT outcomes. We apply each lens separately to describe patterns emerging from the previous power and IT studies. In addition, we discuss the similarities and differences that occur when the two sets of lenses are simultaneously applied. We draw from this discussion to develop metaconjectures, (i.e., propositions that can be interpreted from multiple perspectives), and to suggest guidelines for studying power in future research.
As telecommunication networks become more common, there is an increasing interest in the factors underlying the development of online social structures. It has been proposed that these structures are new forms of organizing which are not subject to the same constraints as traditional social structures. However, from anecdotal evidence and case studies it is difficult to evaluate whether online social structures are subject to the same problems as traditional social structures. Drawing from prior studies of traditional social structures and empirical analyses of longitudinal data from a sample of Internet-based groups, this exploratory work considers the role of size and communication activity in sustainable online social structures. A resource-based theory of sustainable social structures is presented. Members contribute time, energy, and other resources, enabling a social structure to provide benefits for individuals. These benefits, which include information, influence, and social support, are the basis for a social structure's ability to attract and retain members. This model focuses on the system of opposing forces that link membership size as a component of resource availability and communication activity as an aspect of benefit provision to the sustainability of an online social structure. Analyses of data from a random sample of e-mail-based Internet social structures (listservs) indicate that communication activity and size have both positive and negative effects on a structure's sustainability. These results suggest that while the use of networked communication technologies may alter the form of communication, balancing the opposing impacts of membership size and communication activity in order to maintain resource availability and provide benefits for current members remains a fundamental problem underlying the development of sustainable online social structures.