Drawing on theories on dispersed teamwork, computer-mediated communications, and organizations, we examine the direct associations between temporal distance and team performance as well as the mediating role of team interaction. We tested our research model in a laboratory experiment with four temporal distance conditions. Results show that the direct associations between temporal distance and team performance are substantially diminished when we enter the intervening team communication variables (communication frequency and turn-taking) into the analysis model. We find that communication frequency and turn-taking have differentiated effects on conveyance of information and convergence on its meaning. Conveyance is positively associated with production speed, whereas convergence is positively associated with higher product quality (i.e., accuracy). These findings speak to the theoretical significance of communication patterns and information exchange behaviors in dispersed team research. They also transcend the common wisdom that temporal distance is good for speed and bad for quality. > >
Organizational crisis management has traditionally favored a centralized plan-and-control approach. This study explores the possibility for an orderly crisis management process to arise unintentionally from decentralized and spontaneous actions in an online community (i.e., self-organization). Based on complex adaptive systems theory, a multilevel model is developed to account for the logical relation between individual-level actions and interactions in an online community and an organizational-level orderly and rational crisis management process, as described by the organizational crisis management literature. We apply this multilevel model to an analysis of 89,596 posts from an online community that was deeply embedded in an earthquake-induced organizational crisis. Results indicate that fluctuation of message content themes in this online community served to energize continuous input from ordinary organization members. These input actualized new possibilities offered by the technology platform for crisis management actions (i.e., actualized IT affordances). Concatenation of immediate impacts of message content themes and actualized IT affordances formed feedback loops that moderated the crisis management activities toward an efficient trajectory. Our findings challenge the traditional assumption that macro-level order requires micro-level order-seeking behaviors. They suggest the viability of self-organization as a new source of organizational order that complements the traditional centralized plan-and-control approach. Theoretical and empirical implications for harnessing the power of ordinary organization members connected by today’s technology platforms are discussed.
Although information systems researchers have long recognized the possibility for collective- level information technology use patterns and outcomes to emerge from individual-level IT use behaviors, few have explored the key properties and mechanisms involved in this bottom-up IT use process. This paper seeks to build a theoretical framework drawing on the concepts and the analytical tool of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory. The paper presents a CAS model of IT use that encodes a bottom-up IT use process into three interrelated elements: agents that consist of the basic entities of actions in an IT use process, interactions that refer to the mutually adaptive behaviors of agents, and an environment that represents the social organizational contexts of IT use. Agent-based modeling is introduced as the analytical tool for computationally representing and examining the CAS model of IT use. The operationability of the CAS model and the analytical tool are demonstrated through a theory-building exercise translating an interpretive case study of IT use to a specific version of the CAS model. While Orlikowski (1996) raised questions regarding the impacts of employee learning, IT flexibility, and workplace rigidity on IT-based organization transformation, the CAS model indicates that these factors in individual-level actions do not have a direct causal linkage with organizational- level IT use patterns and outcomes. This theory-building exercise manifests the intriguing nature of the bottom-up IT use process: collective-level IT use patterns and outcomes are the logical and yet often unintended or unforeseeable consequences of individual-level behaviors. The CAS model of IT use offers opportunities for expanding the theoretical and methodological scope of the IT use literature.