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These projects, done in WTO’s early years, established the reputation the group has today in the field of organization and technology studies.
Collaborating Across Companies and Context
(2003-2007)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds and Mark Mortensen
Students: Tsedal Beyene and Ingrid Erickson
Structuring Distributed Work
(2001-2007)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds and Cathleen McGrath (Carnegie Mellon University)
Scholars have recently argued for flatter, organic organizational structures that enable workers to deal more effectively with dynamic and uncertain environments. This presumption, however, has been challenged in distributed work, particularly when workers are globally distributed. In an initial study of 33 R&D teams, we found that although this network form is associated with more smooth coordination in collocated teams, the opposite is true for geographically distributed teams. In fact, an informal hierarchical structure was associated with more smooth coordination in distributed teams. These results add to the scant literature on networks in teams and provide insight into important differences in the structure of geographically distributed and collocated teams.
Publications:
- Hinds, P. & McGrath, C. (2006). Structures that work: Social structure, work structure, and performance in geographically distributed teams. Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Banff, Canada.
Conflict in Distributed Teams
(2000-2005)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds, Diane Bailey, and Mark Mortensen (MIT)
Conflict is said to be more severe and harder to manage in distributed teams. In several studies, we have compared the dynamics of conflict in collocated and distributed teams. In our theoretical work on conflict in distributed teams, 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.
In our empirical work, 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.
Publications:
- Hinds, P & Mortensen, M. (2005). Understanding conflict in geographically distributed teams: An empirical investigation. Organization Science, 16, 290-307.
- Hinds, P. & Bailey, D. (2003). Out of sight, Out of sync: Understanding conflict in distributed teams. Organization Science, 14, 615-632.
- Mortensen, M. & Hinds, P. (2001). Conflict and shared identity in geographically distributed teams. International Journal of Conflict Management, 212-238.
- Hinds, P. & Mortensen, M. (2002). Understanding antecedents to conflict in geographically distributed research and development teams. Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS). Atlanta, GA: Association for Information Systems.
- Mortensen, M. & Hinds, P. (2001). Conflict and shared identity in geographically distributed teams. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, Washington, D.C., OCIS B1-B6.
- Hinds, P. & Bailey, D. (2000). Virtual team performance: Modeling the impact of temporal and geographic virtuality. Academy of Management Best Paper Proceedings, Toronto, Canada, OCIS C1-C6.
- Hinds, P. & Zolin, R. (2004). Trust in context: The development of interpersonal trust in geographically distributed work. In Roderick M.Kramer and Karen S. Cook (Eds.), Trust and Distrust within Organizational Contexts (pp. 214-238). New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
- Hinds, P. & Weisband, S. (2003).Shared knowledge and shared understanding in virtual teams. In C.B. Gibson and S. G. Cohen (Eds.), Virtual Teams That Work (pp. 21-36). New York, NY: Jossey-Bass.
Knowledge Transfer & Knowledge Use
(1998-2005)
Faculty: Pamela Hinds, Jeffrey Pfeffer, and Laurie Weingart (Carnegie Mellon University)
Students: Kristina Dahlin (Carnegie Mellon University) and Michael Patterson
In this series of studies, we examined the factors that contributed to and inhibited knowledge sharing and knowledge use among workers. We conducted field studies and laboratory experiments on the limitations of expertise and, more generally, on the cognitive and motivational challenges of sharing expertise, especially within organizations. We also conducted a study of the factors that facilitated the use of knowledge in diverse teams.
Publications:
- Dahlin, K., Weingart, L, & Hinds, P. (2006). Team diversity and information use. Academy of Management Journal, 48, 1107-1123.
- Hinds, P., Patterson, M., & Pfeffer, J. (2001). Bothered by abstraction: The effect of expertise on knowledge transfer and subsequent novice performance. Journal of Applied Psychology, 86, 1232-1243.
- Hinds, P. (1999). The curse of expertise: The effects of expertise and debiasing methods on predictions of novice performance. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 5, 205-221.
Assessing the Role of Technology in the Work of Modern Engineers
(2000-2003)
Faculty: Diane Bailey and Stephen Barley
Students: Fabrizio Ferraro, Hemi Gefen, Mahesh Bhatia, Julie Gainsburg, Lesley Sept, Jan Chong, Carlos Rodriguez-Lluesma
Funding: National Science Foundation (IIS - 0070468)
Corporate Research Partner: General Motors
We know very little about what engineers actually do all day, the technologies they employ, and the extent to which their knowledge and tasks are being commodified, for example by being digitized and stored in engineering design databases. Our ignorance in these matters severely limits our ability to successfully design engineering workspaces and tools, to manage engineering groups, to educate and train engineers, and to understand the larger role of the engineer within the firm and in society. In this research project, WTO researchers pair up with experts from civil engineering and electrical engineering to study two types of engineers: structural engineers who design buildings and electrical engineers who design chips. Employing ethnographic techniques involving observation and interviews, we seek to answer three questions: (1) What do engineers do, and how does what they do vary by engineering discipline? (2) What technologies do engineers employ to accomplish work, and why? (3) To what extent and in what manner do these technologies embody engineering knowledge and tasks?
Contingent Work in the Silicon Valley
(1998-2003)
Faculty: Stephen Barley and Gideon Kunda (University of Tel Aviv)
The use of contract and contingent workers is growing throughout the U. S. economy, but nowhere is this more true than among engineers and software designers in the Silicon Valley. Reliance on skilled contingent workers represents a sharp break with employment practices of the recent past and provides fertile ground for studying the emergence of new labor market institutions. This program of research explores the social and institutional ecology of contract engineering in the Silicon Valley and focuses on identifying emerging organizational patterns that structure the market for highly skilled contractors. Professors Barley and Kunda are conducting detailed ethnographies of staffing firms with different business models, compiling life histories with contractors from the Silicon Valley and elsewhere, and doing observational studies of project teams in client organizations that are staffed by a combination of contractors and full time employees.
Publications:
- Barley, S. R. and G. Kunda (2006) Contracting: A New Form of Professional Practice. Academy of Management Perspective. 19:1-19.
- Barley, S. R. and G. Kunda. (2006) Itinerant Experts. In J. O'Toole and E. E. Lawler, Eds. America at Work: Choices and Challenges, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Forthcoming.
- Evans, J., G. Kunda and S. R. Barley. (2004) "Beach Time, Bridge Time, and Billable Hours: The Temporal Structure of Technical Contracting." Administrative Science Quarterly, 49: 1-38.
- Barley, S. R. and Kunda, G. (2004) Gurus, Hired Guns and Warm Bodies: Itinerant Experts in a Knowledge Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
- G. Kunda, S. R. Barley, and J. Evans. (2002) "Why do Contractors Contract? The Experience of Highly Skilled Technical Professionals in a Contingent Labor Market." Industrial and Labor Relations Review 55:234-261
Designing Work Systems for Innovative versus Routine Work
Faculty: Robert Sutton
This stream of research that builds on James March's distinction between exploration of new possibilities and exploitation of existing skills, knowledge, and markets. Sutton's research shows that to organize for innovative work, a company or team needs work practices that bring in diverse ideas, to see old things in new ways (which he calls vu ja de, a kind of reverse déjà vu), and to break from the past, with the goal of making money later. In contrast, to organize for routine work, a company needs to drive out variation to assure consistency in actions and products, see old things in old ways, and replicate past and proven knowledge and actions, with the goal of making money now.
Publications:
- Sutton, R. I. (2002) Weird Ideas That Work: 11 1/2 Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation. New York: Free Press.
- Sutton, R. I. (2001) The Weird Rules of Creativity. Harvard Business Review.
Knowledge Brokering and Innovation
Faculty: Robert Sutton
Student: Andrew Hargadon
We have been studying business units and companies that are connected to diverse and otherwise disconnected pools of knowledge. Sutton and Hargadon have studied companies including 3M, IDEO Product Development, and Boeing to understand how these "brokers" use that network position to transfer knowledge from where it is plentiful to where it is rare and how they mix their diverse knowledge to invent useful new combinations of existing technologies.
Turning Knowledge Into Action
Faculty: Robert Sutton and Jeffrey Pfeffer (Graduate School of Business)
We examine how forces including metrics, precedent, fear, and dysfunctional internal conflict stop firms from acting on proven knowledge, and especially, how firms overcome and avoid these problems.
Publications:
- Pfeffer, J & Sutton, R. I. (2000) The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press
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