Article

Structures that work: social structure, work structure and coordination ease in geographically distributed teams

Authors:

Cathleen McGrathAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work

Pages 343 - 352

https://doi.org/10.1145/1180875.1180928

Published: 04 November 2006 Publication History

Abstract

Scholars have recently argued for flatter, organic organizational structures that enable workers to deal more effectively with dynamic and uncertain environments. In a correlational study of 33 R&D teams, we find 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.

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Structures that work: social structure, work structure and coordination ease in geographically distributed teams

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cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '06: Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work

November 2006

548 pages

ISBN:1595932496

DOI:10.1145/1180875

General Chairs:
Pamela Hinds
Stanford University, USA
,
David Martin
SMART Technologies Inc., Canada

Copyright © 2006 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 04 November 2006

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November 4 - 8, 2006

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