The Knowledge Application and Utilization Framework Applied to Defense COTS: A Research Synthesis for Outsourced Innovation

Purpose -- Militaries of developing nations face increasing budget pressures, high operations tempo, a blitzing pace of technology, and adversaries that often meet or beat government capabilities using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies. The adoption of COTS products into defense acquisitions has been offered to help meet these challenges by essentially outsourcing new product development and innovation. This research summarizes extant research to develop a framework for managing the innovative and knowledge flows. Design/Methodology/Approach – A literature review of 62 sources was conducted with the objectives of identifying antecedents (barriers and facilitators) and consequences of COTS adoption. Findings – The DoD COTS literature predominantly consists of industry case studies, and there’s a strong need for further academically rigorous study. Extant rigorous research implicates the importance of the role of knowledge management to government innovative thinking that relies heavily on commercial suppliers. Research Limitations/Implications – Extant academically rigorous studies tend to depend on measures derived from work in information systems research, relying on user satisfaction as the outcome. Our findings indicate that user satisfaction has no relationship to COTS success; technically complex governmental purchases may be too distant from users or may have socio-economic goals that supersede user satisfaction. The knowledge acquisition and utilization framework worked well to explain the innovative process in COTS. Practical Implications – Where past research in the commercial context found technological knowledge to outweigh market knowledge in terms of importance, our research found the opposite. Managers either in government or marketing to government should be aware of the importance of market knowledge for defense COTS innovation, especially for commercial companies that work as system integrators. Originality/Value – From the literature emerged a framework of COTS product usage and a scale to measure COTS product appropriateness that should help to guide COTS product adoption decisions and to help manage COTS product implementations ex post

ILR School Ph.D. Dissertations

Compiled by Susan LaCette.ILRSchoolPhD.pdf: 4022 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Thinking About You: Perspective Taking, Perceived Restraint, and Performance

Conflict often arises when incompatible ideas, values or interests lead to actions that harm others. Increasing people’s willingness to refrain from harming others can play a critical role in preventing conflict and fostering performance. We examine perspective taking as a relational micro-process related to such restraint. We argue that attending to how others appraise events supports restraint in two ways. It motivates people to act with concern and enables them to understand what others view as harmful versus beneficial. Using a matched sample of 147 knowledge workers and 147 of their leaders, we evaluate the impact of appraisal-related perspective taking on leaders’ perceptions of knowledge workers’ restraint and performance

In search for the not-invented-here syndrome: The role of knowledge sources and firm success

The not-invented-here (NIH) syndrome refers to internal resistance in a company against externally developed knowledge. In this paper, we argue that the occurrence of the NIH syndrome depends on the source of external knowledge and the success of the firm that aims at adapting external knowledge. In line with social identity theory, we hypothesize that internal resistance is most likely to occur if knowledge is acquired from similar organizations. This hypothesis is supported by our finding that the NIH syndrome occurs when knowledge is acquired from competitors but not if knowledge is acquired from suppliers, customers or universities. Further, we show that successful companies are most likely to experience the NIH syndrome (if knowledge is acquired from competitors). This is in line with our hypothesis that firm success increases the extent to which employees identify themselves with their company resulting in stronger in-group favoritism and a superior tendency to reject externally generated knowledge. --Not-invented-here syndrome,external knowledge sources,firm success,social identity theory,organizational identity

Open Source Project Collapse – Sources and Patterns of Failure

Why do open source projects fail? Open source projects have gained tremendous momentum, in theory, managerial practice and global economy. However, a large number of projects are now dormant, collapsed, or abandoned. Even celebrated success stories lose developers and fail. Yet, failure is underexplored and our understanding of developer departure is limited. Previous literature has concentrated on prospering projects, attracting contributors, and expanding communities, but it is unclear why even well-integrated members leave and projects fail. This study explores open source project failure by drawing on ten in-depth open source software case studies and netnographic analyses. We identify antecedents of developer departure, discover patterns of project collapse, and reveal where members move. We complement the dominant research logic of how to facilitate membership on-boarding with the aspect of understanding de-boarding. Our results enhance our understanding of why and how open projects fail and involve implications for open organizations

Subject: Careers and Occupations

Compiled by Susan LaCette.Careers.pdf: 808 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

EFFECT OF ROLE DYNAMICS ON TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEM AND TEAM PERFORMANCE IN OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE TEAMS: THE MODERATING ROLE OF COMMUNICATION

Open-source software (OSS) development is leading trends in the software market. OSS teams occupied with knowledge-intensive tasks are confronted with role-related issues. Team-level role dynamics (i.e., role ambiguity and role conflict) which manifest whether information about roles (e.g., expected responsibilities, behaviours, and outcomes) perceived by members are clarified and coherent, affect team performance. Information about roles can be considered clues for expertise recognition and location, which strengthens members’ reliable understandings about others’ knowledge and work cooperation. Namely, it may influence transactive memory system (TMS), a group work pattern based on cognitive labour division. Although prior studies have proposed that role-related constructs (e.g., role identification, and role conflict) influence team cognitions (e.g., TMS) and team performance, the relationships between role dynamics, TMS and team performance are still unclear. This study intends to explore the affective and cognitive mechanism through which role dynamics influence TMS under various boundary conditions (i.e., instrumental and expressive communication), and provides a further understanding about how to enhance team performance within the mechanism. An empirical study sampling from OSS communities like SourceForge and GitHub will be conducted to verify our hypotheses. Our research intends to offer theoretical and managerial implications about role concerns in OSS teams