Research on Managing Groups and Teams: Volume 3

In a longitudinal field study we tested several hypotheses of adaptive structuration theory, which predicts the impacts of advanced information technologies on work teams. We observed 47 technical and administrative work teams in a large, multinational energy company. The teams varied in their structural properties—team size and geographical dispersion—and in their degree of interaction with one another. We tracked the extent to which the teams used advanced information technologies, and we assessed the impacts of technology use practices on teams' views of the quality of their coordination and their overall group effectiveness. The teams in our study had access to a range of traditional and advanced technologies, and we observed the impacts of team structural properties on technology use practices and outcomes across a three-year period. Use practices varied between the two types of teams. We found that, early on introduction of technology, team size, geographic dispersion, and meeting frequency predicted advanced technology use by administrative teams. Larger administrative teams reported more comfort with technology use, and they were more likely to use the technology to dominate one another rather than to collaborate. These effects diminished over time, however, and the influence of team structure and interaction patterns on advanced technology use were not clearcut. Use practices, which we label “appropriation,” impacted perceptions of coordination quality, especially in the case of technical teams. The most consistent pattern was that use of technology to dominate rather than to collaborate was negatively related to outcomes. Surprisingly, teams with relatively high use of advanced technologies grew in their use of the technology for domination purposes over the course of our study. Our findings suggest the need for more in-depth study of technology use practices in teams over time.

This study investigated operating room teams confronted with learning a radically new technology for performing cardiac surgery. Implementing new technology in hospitals is challenging because of the perceived risk to human life of trying something new when current approaches meet widely accepted standards of care. Understanding the learning and adoption process is therefore critical, both for innovators introducing new technologies and for hospitals seeking to adopt them. Past research in medicine has found that cumulative experience using new techniques leads to improvement but has not investigated organizational and group characteristics that may facilitate obtaining the right kinds of experience and ultimately facilitate successful adoption of new approaches. This paper begins to address this gap by examining organizational and group characteristics that vary across operating room teams learning a new technology. A specific barrier to learning that these teams faced was the highly precise routines characterizing the conventional surgical procedure; the new technology disrupted these routines, requiring the operating room teams to relearn how to work together. We report on data collected in 165 interviews with members of the operating room and others associated with the cardiac surgery process at 16 hospitals.

Much of the research about groups in organizations has been framed around traditional work groups with features such as work that is done in the same place, at the same time, for the same organization. These features and related assumptions have shaped our theories and research about groups. This chapter first presents a framework for distinguishing between traditional and new forms of groups and then offers arguments about why our theories and research strategies must change as we move from groups with traditional features to new forms of work groups. This basic thesis is illustrated by examining the concept of socialization. We argue that traditional socialization mechanisms may not apply to new forms of work groups, and we introduce the concept of “substitutes for socialization” to explain the socialization processes in these new groups.

High-technology production requires both increasing specialization in expert teams, and increasing cross-functional cooperation across team boundaries. These objectives can be in conflict. This chapter examines the social processes by which expert teams cooperate, despite the heterogeneous views and opinions arising from their specializations. The focus is on the dynamics of cooperation among expert teams of engineers responsible for trouble management in production of dynamic random access memory (DRAM), a class of integrated circuit semiconductor devices. Trouble management is the handling of routine problems that defy simple classification and solution due to their origins at the margins of scientific and engineering knowledge. Three DRAM engineering teams are studied: design, process, and process integration. The findings suggest that the crucial challenge in achieving cooperation among these teams rests not in strategies for collecting and classifying relevant problem/solution information. Rather, it is in the management of a political process of “problematization” that assigns “problem spaces” to “solution spaces” corresponding to the biases of each team. This process is triggered by the rise of “boundary instances” of trouble that require action across team boundaries. Resolution depends on successful use of “boundary objects” to articulate the work of problem solving among the teams.

The rapid advance of information technology has led to the creation of new business models and new organizational forms. We argue that these new business models have a profound impact on workgroups. The purpose of this chapter is to explore the impact of these new organization forms on workgroup structure and process. The chapter offers a number of propositions about group structure and processes, and explores their implications for workgroups found in technologically enabled firms. The groups that develop in technologically enabled organizations are characterized by a focus on self-organizing, a variety of skills, fluid membership, extensive information and knowledge sharing, relational governance, membership from a variety of organizations, extensive boundary spanning, negotiated meaning and potential conflicts between skills and values.

Control crews in high reliability organizations must react quickly to identify and resolve potentially disastrous nonroutine events. However, much of the previous work concerning control crew performance has focused either on the impact of automated systems on crews' nonroutine event management or on case study accounts concerning the social systems of crews during these abnormal events. This paper suggests that by focusing on elements of both systems—automated and social—a general model of control crew performance can be developed. The model presented here suggests that system interface characteristics affect the speed with which crews identify nonroutine events, and that task-based conflict affects the speed with which crews resolve nonroutine events. Testable propositions are derived from the model, and implications for both future research and practice are discussed.

The use of portable computers connected to high-speed networks is changing the way groups do their work. Such systems reduce the need for teams to be co-located by allowing team members to communicate with one another and access a wide range of databases. Despite the growing use of such systems, relatively little research has looked broadly at how these systems affect aspects of group process and performance. We interviewed individuals in 10 firms that are implementing mobile computing in work groups. Based on those interviews, we describe how mobile computing is changing interdependent work and speculate on how it may influence job scope and team empowerment, group composition, supervisory practices, and socialization processes. We also conclude that attention to both the functional and informal characteristics of knowledge management systems associated with mobile computing can influence group processes and performance.

Most interpersonal or group communication via the Internet involves people who are not co-present and are not interacting at the same time. Typically, messages contain only text and graphics. This means that people cannot use tone of voice or nonverbal signals to judge the accuracy of messages or, in some cases, even to know the other's true identity. These features of computer-mediated interaction may have dramatic effects on the ways people communicate and how they make judgments about whether the messages of other group members are truthful or deceptive. However, little research has examined truth telling and lying in computer-mediated interaction or in groups larger than two. This chapter investigates how computer-mediated communication affects the composition, transmission, and detection of truthful and deceptive messages.

Quantitative and qualitative analyses of data generated in a lab study comparing anonymous and identified computer-supported groups involved in consensus decision-making discussions are presented. It is argued that anonymity removes some tools of persuasion, and increases the difficulty of coordinating discussion. Anonymous groups were found to increase the persuasiveness of their text-based messages, to increase discussion process management behaviors, and to find ways to label each other. No significant effect of anonymity on the number of groups reaching consensus was found. The implications of these results for future research and for practice are discussed.

This chapter considers the social structuring processes that occur in groups using computer medicated communications (CMC). Building on a model of status dynamics in face-to-face groups, we develop a series of propositions that indicate how characteristic differences between face-to-face and computer-mediated communications media are likely to affect the behaviors used by individuals to manage their status in a group setting. We propose several types of behaviors or moves that appear to be used to create, negotiate, and manage status in electronically communicating groups. We use qualitative field data from on-going teams to illustrate this perspective of how communication technology can shape the informal social structures of groups.

Technology has made it possible to have groups whose members are not co-located, but which may still capture the benefits of traditional co-located interaction. Identification helps determine whether groups gain the benefits of co-located interaction, and how technology is used to mediate group interaction can influence identification processes. Unfortunately, in heterogeneous groups, communication technology that facilitates group identification also makes competing “fault line” identities more salient. Fortunately, channel expansion theory suggests that with effective management, groups can avoid this dilemma of media selection by learning to use lean media to communicate rich messages.When the day arrived for the three of us were to send a draft of this chapter to Terri, Greg decided that it would be funny to e-mail her a terribly underdeveloped outline, instead of the completed draft that we had finished the day earlier. Terri, seeing the outline for the joke it was, called Greg and said that it might be fun to send a message that made Mike think she had sent the terribly underdeveloped outline to the other chapter authors. Mike received the message the next day and asked Greg why he had sent an outline instead of the chapter draft to Terri. Greg mentioned his and Terri's pranks and also mentioned that Terri had copied the message to Mark—the other author on the chapter, but someone Mike had never (and at the time of this writing, still has not) met. Mike, not wanting to be left out of a good joke (but also slightly uncomfortable to pull a prank on a “stranger”), sent a follow-up message to Terri and “cc'd” Mark. The message said that Mike was so embarrassed by the outline and so frustrated with Greg, that he was going to drop his name from the paper, and was not going to present the paper at the authors' conference in New York. Mark joked back that he would be glad to present, but the title of the paper would now be “Virtual Collaboration: The Butthead Factor.”

In this chapter, we discuss how individuals acquire knowledge through group experiences and how technologies used by virtual teams will affect this process. The effect of groups on individual member learning is a fundamental, but relatively unexplored, aspect of group effectiveness. We propose that group members can acquire knowledge in two ways: via other group members and through products that groups generate. With respect to acquisition via group members, we emphasize how collaborative processes provide opportunities for learning. With respect to knowledge transfer via group products, we pay particular attention to the mechanisms by which group members store knowledge. We address how information and communication technologies can influence these mechanisms for knowledge acquisition when working in virtual teams. In general, our review suggests that there are numerous challenges to knowledge acquisition in distributed groups. We conclude by discussing methods for enhancing opportunities for learning in virtual teams.

This concluding chapter of Volume 3 of Research in Managing Groups and Teams: Technology identifies themes in research on groups and technology represented in the volume. The chapter also discusses the implications of changes in group structures and processes enabled by technology for four fundamental features of groups: interdependence, social identity, embeddedness, and temporal dynamics. The chapter argues that these features will continue to be defining characteristics of groups but that new technologies will occasion more variation on these features. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future research on groups and technology that is likely to be especially fruitful.