From the perspective of leader-member exchange theory, we investigate how two forms of leadership style (uniform leader-member exchange (ULMX) and differential leader-member exchange (DLMX)) impact member participation in online collaborative work communities (OCWC). Furthermore, based on computer simulations, we also examine the moderating impact of key contextual factors on the relationship between leadership style and member contributions. Efficacy of leadership style in OCWCs is greatly influenced by environmental conditions. DLMX is more effective in sustaining member commitment under high environmental uncertainty, regardless of network size and structure. ULMX is more effective in decentralized structures and during the early stage of community growth. The simulation-based insights suggest that supervisory behavior does matter to member retention and sustained participation in OCWCs, but its impact is significantly moderated by many contextual factors, such as community size, structure, maturity, and environmental uncertainty. In certain situations ULMX prevails, but in others DLMX is more effective. These two forms of governance in fact complement each other, rather than being mutually exclusive forms of leadership style. To attain a maximal outcome, leaders should flexibly adapt their governance styles between DLMX and ULMX over the life cycle of an OCWC to maximize member retention and performance benefits.
Recent years have witnessed a surge in self-organizing voluntary teams collaborating online to produce goods and services. Motivated by this phenomenon, this research investigates how these teams are formed and how individuals make decisions about which teams to join in the context of open source software development (OSSD). The focus of this paper is to explore how the collaborative network affects developers' choice of newly initiated OSS projects to participate in. More specifically, by analyzing software project data from real-world OSSD projects, we empirically test the impact of past collaborative ties with and perceived status of project members in the network on the self-assembly of OSSD teams. Overall, we find that a developer is more likely to join a project when he has strong collaborative ties with its initiator. We also find that perceived status of the noninitiator members of a project influences its probability of attracting developers. We discuss the implications of our results with respect to self-organizing teams and OSSD.
This paper explores a new phenomenon at the intersection of digital networks and organizations—the Internet-based volunteer work force—people who use Internet applications to pursue a personal interest through volunteering contributions of time and talent that may create value for organizations and their customers or members. This work force is not centrally organized, managed, or measured. It is an emergent phenomenon resulting from discretionary small actions taken by large numbers of people, enabled by technology and human initiative. This paper proposes a general framework for understanding the phenomenon and offers an empirical investigation of one component of it—the role of feedback in producing and sustaining high-quality contributions from this work force. In a comparative study of Internet-based voluntary technical support groups for software problems, we found that in groups who implement systematic quality feedback systems (compared to those that do not), question askers return over a longer duration, answer providers contribute more often, and technical problem resolution is more effective. We also found that with systematic feedback, volunteers who produce higher quality contributions have longer participation duration, and participation duration is positively associated with community maintenance contributions.