Collaborative distance: investigating issues related to distance factors affecting collaboration performance

Both organisations and individuals are using more collaborative work, across geographic, disciplinary and organisational boundaries, leading to increased demand for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support a more effective and efficient distributed collaboration. This thesis presents an empirical study exploring various aspects related to collaborative distance in the context of innovation projects. It focuses on the investigation of issues related to distance factors that affect collaboration effectiveness and efficiency. A total of 14 focus group interviews, undertaken with 75 participants in a comparative study of 14 project cases, revealed sufficient evidence on distance factors in the context of mixed (face-to-face and online or virtual) collocation modes. The results confirmed the positive role of collaboration technology for compressing geographical and temporal types of distance; other distance types were also bridged, however, other distance types were created. This empirical study aims to enlarge the academic understanding of distance factors by disambiguating their description and deciphering their role in the collaboration process, and clarifying the reasons for the use and improvement of collaboration technology for overcoming collaborative distances. It also confirms that distance factors raise collaboration barriers, and reveals that they disturb the collaboration mechanics by hindering knowledge workers’ capacity to reach a mutual understanding. Such findings have deep implications for the future enhancement of collaboration technology to fill the current gaps in distributed collaboration, also called e-Collaboration

Collaborative distance: investigating issues related to distance factors affecting collaboration performance

Both organisations and individuals are using more collaborative work, across geographic, disciplinary and organisational boundaries, leading to increased demand for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to support a more effective and efficient distributed collaboration. This thesis presents an empirical study exploring various aspects related to collaborative distance in the context of innovation projects. It focuses on the investigation of issues related to distance factors that affect collaboration effectiveness and efficiency. A total of 14 focus group interviews, undertaken with 75 participants in a comparative study of 14 project cases, revealed sufficient evidence on distance factors in the context of mixed (face-to-face and online or virtual) collocation modes. The results confirmed the positive role of collaboration technology for compressing geographical and temporal types of distance; other distance types were also bridged, however, other distance types were created. This empirical study aims to enlarge the academic understanding of distance factors by disambiguating their description and deciphering their role in the collaboration process, and clarifying the reasons for the use and improvement of collaboration technology for overcoming collaborative distances. It also confirms that distance factors raise collaboration barriers, and reveals that they disturb the collaboration mechanics by hindering knowledge workers’ capacity to reach a mutual understanding. Such findings have deep implications for the future enhancement of collaboration technology to fill the current gaps in distributed collaboration, also called e-Collaboration

The impact of organisational structure on the performance of virtual teams

Globalisation and advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are contributing to the increased virtualisation of work teams within organisations. Researchers are in agreement that most modern day work teams have some degree of virtualisation (Workman, 2007) and that it is critical for researchers and practitioners alike to understand the impact of virtualisation on the inputs, process and outputs of work teams. Benefits commonly associated with increased team virtualisation such as increased knowledge retention (Dietz-Uhler&Bishop-Clark, 2001), cost savings (Bergiel, Bergiel,&Balsmeier, 2008) and flexibility (Clemons&Kroth, 2011) are proven and well researched. However we know that no benefit can be obtained without incurring some sort of a cost (Colander, 2010) and research showed that virtual teams typically incur additional challenges in the areas of communication, culture, technology and leadership (Kayworth&Leidner, 2000).This research hypothesised that the three levers of organizational structure as defined by Satô (2010) namely the formalization, standardization and centralization of organisational elements can ease the negative effects caused by an increase in team virtualisation. We evaluated the impact that the organisational structure has on the performance of work teams throughout the team virtualisation continuum by conducting a set of interviews, a survey and performing descriptive quantitative analysis on the results. A total of three interviews were conducted which served as confirmation of our research questions and provided guidance to construct the questionnaire. A total of 87 respondents participated in our online survey of which 69 responses were included in the quantitative analysis phase. The responses received were equally distributed between four categories namely: Organic Face-to-face, Mechanistic Face-to-face, Organic Virtual and Mechanistic Virtual.The results revealed that there is no statistically significant relationship between the organisational structure and the performance of virtual teams. We further noticed a higher variance in the performance scores of virtual teams which indicates that the performance of virtual teams are more inconsistent than that of Face-to-face teams. The key finding of the research is that virtual teams perform equally well in both organic and mechanistic organisational structures.Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2012.Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS)unrestricte

Modelling information flow for organisations delivering microsystems technology

Motivated by recent growth and applications of microsystems technology (MST), companies within the MST domain are beginning to explore avenues for understanding, maintaining and improving information flow, within their organisations and to/from customers, with a view to enhancing delivery performance. Delivery for organisations is the flow of goods from sellers to buyers and a classic approach to understanding information flow is via the use of modelling techniques. Cont/d

Effective lean-team interactions through leader values and members’ information sharing behaviour

Leaders are often blamed when lean work-floor initiatives fail. We hypothesise that leanteam leaders’ work values affect their team members’ information sharing behaviour and, through them, attain more effective team interactions. 429 survey responses of leaders and members of 25 lean-teams in service and manufacturing organisations were analysed through structural equation modeling, linear regression analyses, and Sobel tests. The positive relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ self-transcendence values, and the negative relationship between lean-team effectiveness and leaders’ conservation values were partly mediated by team information sharing behaviour. Future research must compare the content of effective lean-team interactions to non-lean teams

Social construction of IS evaluation: a case study of IT investment appraisal

This study explores the phenomenon of the social construction of IS investment evaluation in the financial services industry. The extensive literature on information systems (IS) evaluation stretches back more than thirty years and it is widely agreed that IS evaluation is an important and complex issue. Constructivist evaluation, which serves to develop the interpretivist strand of the literature, concentrates on the notion that evaluations are the outcomes of an interaction and argumentation process between various interested parties. The purpose of this research is to shed further light on the IS investment evaluation area. Explaining the practice of IS evaluation within the dynamic and technologically sophisticated financial services industry would benefit academics and financial services firms alike. This context is relatively neglected in the existing literature. The chosen case study reflects the demands in the financial services industry to upgrade their infrastructure in order to manage an ever increasing number of transactions, as well as increased regulation. The fieldwork produced extensive data concerning traditional trading, brokerage, high frequency algorithmic trading and transaction clearing. The rapid rise of derivative transactions during the last few years caused problems in terms of clearing and managing the transactions. At the same time, hedge funds‘ growing demand for low latency execution services and changes in regulations increased, pressuring firms in the industry to invest heavily. Actor-network theory (ANT) is used in order to describe and explain the formation of networks between human and non-human actors. The theory‘s specific vocabulary allows IS evaluation to be seen in a new light and the study uses ANT analysis to produce insight into the longstanding problem of IS evaluation, human and non-human interactions and roles within the context if IT investment appraisal. Building on ANT, this thesis is an in-depth case study of the employment process of an IT evaluation method at a global financial services company

Technostress Research: A Nurturing Ground for Measurement Pluralism?

Because technostress research is multidisciplinary in nature and, therefore, benefits from insights gained from various research disciplines, we expected a high degree of measurement pluralism in technostress studies published in the information systems (IS) literature. However, because IS research mostly relies on self-report measures in general, reasons exist to also assume that technostress research has largely neglected multi-method research designs. To assess the status quo of technostress research with respect to the application of multi-method approaches, we analyzed 103 empirical studies. Specifically, we analyzed the types of data-collection methods used and the investigated components of the technostress process (person, environment, stressors, strains, and coping). The results indicate that multi-method research is more prevalent in the IS technostress literature (approximately 37% of reviewed studies) than in the general IS literature (approximately 20% as reported in previous reviews). However, our findings also show that IS technostress studies significantly rely on self-report measures. We argue that technostress research constitutes a nurturing ground for the application of multi-method approaches and multidisciplinary collaboration