INCREASING TEAM COORDINATION AND SOCIAL MOTIVATION THROUGH AWARENESS PRACTICES: A CASE STUDY

People working in teams are vulnerable to so-called process losses, which occur when the teams output is less than what could be produced given the capabilities of the team members. Teams can develop practices that provide awareness of each other\u27s activities, thereby enabling them to coordinate activities better and reducing one of these process losses coordination loss. Such awareness is harder to maintain when team members are geographically dispersed, but can be promoted using social computing technologies. We present a framework derived from a case study that identifies drivers of awareness practices in geographically dispersed teams. Our investigation indicates that new awareness practices were developed at times when the teams faced changes in the team\u27s goals, social computing context, physical context, and team structure. The teams developed awareness practices to improve coordination in the teams, but the practices had the added effect of decreasing social motivation losses. Based on these results, organizations that are considering implementing social computing technologies such as life streaming and microblogging are advised to take social motivation into account formulating their implementation strategies. Designers and users of social computing technology are similarly advised to consider latent social motivation effects that might occur in organizational teams when social computing technology and practices are introduced

Media Repertoires - Making Sense Of The Dynamics Of Usage Practices

The concept of communication media repertoires introduced by Watson-Manheim and Bélanger (2007) has extended the existing literature by adding a technology-in-practice perspective to the examination of communication media choice in an organizational setting. While Watson-Manheim and Bélanger (2007) have focused on describing the existing media repertoires (set of available media and existing usage practices for specific purposes) and actual media usage decisions at two different companies at one point in time, this paper seeks to investigate dynamic transformations of communication media repertoires resulting from the introduction of a new platform technology over time. This paper is based on an in-depth case study on the roll-out of a Real Time Collaboration system to a financial service company. It reports on the resulting transformation of existing and the emergence of new usage practices for the purpose of coordinating team availability, thereby pointing out that (initial) usage practices of a new communication technology can only be understood against the background of already established practices and their history

Activity Awareness as a Means to Promote Connectedness, Willingness to Do Additional Work, and Congeniality: An Experimental Study

People have been shown to exhibit social loafing when working as a team, and these effects are thought to be enhanced when working in distributed contexts. This paper reports on an experiment that examined the effect of activity awareness on feelings of connectedness and willingness to work in virtual teams. The results show that activity awareness indeed had a significant impact on feelings of connectedness and that the relationship between activity awareness and willingness to work was fully mediated by feelings of connectedness. Higher feelings of connectedness and willingness to work were associated with higher feelings of congeniality toward the team, which in turn were associated better team performance. Thus, we suggest that social loafing can be decreased in distributed contexts by reporting the activities of team members

Conceptualizing Visibility in Hybrid Work

Hybrid work experienced a surge due to the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing with it reduced visibility of cues used to facilitate effective teamwork and work coordination. While previous research suggests that virtual environments can help re-establish visibility, there is no comprehensive picture of the role of visibility in hybrid work. Based on a systematic search and hermeneutic review of 52 selected papers, we propose a framework that encompasses six dimensions of visibility: location, observer-observee relationship, mode of observation, awareness of observee, type of interaction, and work scenario. We further identify five groups of IT-supported practices aiming to (re-)establish visibility. The suggested framework and the identified practices contribute to a more nuanced understanding of (the role of) visibility in hybrid work environments. Based on our findings, we conceptualize visibility as a double-edged sword and as a continuum. Finally, we discuss implications for theory and practice and suggest avenues for future research

The User-Centered Nature of Awareness Creation in Computer-mediated Communication

In face-to-face contexts, information about the activities, context or emotions of others is typically available and often taken for granted. In computer-mediated communication (CMC) contexts, this awareness information is not readily available and thus needs to be actively signaled by users or technology or otherwise conveyed as byproduct of the ongoing interaction. We present a theory of the dynamic creation of awareness via computer-mediated communication illustrated by a metaphor of pools fed from streams of interaction. Pools of awareness are held within users and gradually fill via signals from others. Users need different pools to be fed and draw from the streams of interaction to feed their pools and reciprocally place information in the streams to feed the pools of others. In addition, pools drain and must be replenished when a new CMC encounter begins. Awareness is thus created actively or as byproduct of social communicative practice, but is not an instant product of technology. We formulate theoretical propositions and discuss implications of our proposed theory for CMC researchers and practitioners

Negotiating Distance: “Presencing Work” in a Case of Remote Telenursing

Telehealth services offer accessible care to distributed populations. However, it is not clear how the important caring intervention of “presence” can be enacted in distributed settings. Information Systems literature theorizes “presence” in distributed work as something to be created by technologies as a precondition for effective work to occur. Following an abductive research process, we compare extant conceptualizations of presence with an empirical case of telenursing. We find that in order to be a caring presence, telenurses must skillfully employ technology while drawing on past embodied experience, in order to balance the “dualities of distance” of nearness and farness; control and freedom. We thus recast presence as a form of skillful work with technology, not as an antecedent to, but a part of telenursing practice. Our model of “the dualities of distance in presencing work” prompts new understandings and offers new directions for future research in both HISR and IS

Practice-centred e-health system design for cross-boundary clinical decision support

The idea of cross-boundary clinical decision support has the potential to transform the design of future work environments for e-health through a connected healthcare system that allows for harnessing of information and peer opinion across geographical boundaries for better decision-making. The trouble, however, is that the use of healthcare information in decision-making usually occurs within the context of a complex structure of clinical work practices that is often shaped by a wide range of factors, including organisational culture, local work contexts, socially constructed traditions of actions, experiences and patients’ circumstances. They vary across geographical boundaries, and have remained largely unaccounted for in the design of current e-health systems. As a result, achieving the visions of e-health, particularly in relation to cross-boundary clinical decision support, requires a rethinking of key clinical and organisational processes in a manner that accommodates work practice as a fundamental part of how clinicians work and make decisions in the real-world. This thesis investigates the concept of work practice as a design requirement for cross-boundary clinical decision support systems in e-health. It is argued that the task of enabling informed decision support across geographical boundaries in e-health can be enhanced through an understanding, and a formal characterisation, of work practices in various healthcare work contexts, and a specification of how practice can be used, managed and transformed to suit various clinical problem situations and patients’ needs. This research takes a clinical practice-centred approach to inform e-health system design, and draws on the concept of work practice and cultural-historical theory in social science as well as situation awareness in order to describe the local traditions of actions that guide clinicians’ work in the real world. It contributes a coherent conceptual architecture comprising a practice-centred awareness model for cross-boundary awareness, a frame-based technique, named PracticeFrame, for formalising and representing work practice for system design, and ContextMorph, for adaptively transforming a suggestion across work boundaries to suit a user’s local work context and practices. An in-depth user-informed requirements capture was used to gain an understanding of clinical work practices for designing e-health system for cross-boundary decision support. A proof of concept prototype, named CaDHealth, which is based on the Brahms work practice modelling tool and includes a work practice visualisation model, named the practice display, was developed and used to conduct user-based evaluation. The evaluation revealed that incorporating practice-centred awareness enhances usefulness, acceptance and user adoption of e-health systems for cross-boundary clinical decision support