Location-Independent Organizations: Designing Collaboration Across Space and Time

Collaboration is critical to organizations and difficult when work is distributed. Prior research has indicated that when individuals are distributed, organizations respond by structuring their work to decrease reciprocal interdependence, reduce the complexity of tasks that individuals perform, or accept moderate inefficiencies. Yet in an increasing number of organizations—location-independent organizations—employees are fully distributed, exist without a physical office, and engage in reciprocally interdependent work. To understand how these distributed organizations collaborate, I undertook an inductive multiple-case study. I identify two patterns of collaboration, an asynchronous orientation and a real-time orientation, and reveal the specific enabling practices for each, with a focus on asynchronous-oriented organizations. This research contributes to the distributed work literature by detailing three novel practices that enable effective collaboration for reciprocally interdependent work without geographic or temporal alignment and to the organizational design literature by identifying distinct approaches to distributed collaboration. This study also engages with the future-of-work conversation by providing empirical grounding that enhances our understanding of the theory, boundary conditions, and nuance of the phenomenon of distributed organizations, specifically location-independent organizations

Humans and Technology: Forms of Conjoined Agency in Organizations

Organizations are increasingly deploying technologies that have the ability to parse through large amounts of data, acquire skills and knowledge, and operate autonomously. These technologies diverge from prior technologies in their capacity to exercise intentionality over protocol development or action selection in the practice of organizational routines, thereby affecting organizations in new and distinct ways. In this article, we categorize four forms of conjoined agency between humans and technologies: (1) conjoined agency with assisting technologies, (2) conjoined agency with arresting technologies, (3) conjoined agency with augmenting technologies, and (4) conjoined agency with automating technologies. We then theorize on the different ways in which these forms of conjoined agency impact a routine’s change at a particular moment in time as well as a routine’s responsiveness to feedback over time. In doing so, we elaborate on how organizations may evolve in varied and diverse ways based on the form(s) of conjoined agency they deploy in their organizational design choices

Resource interdependence and successful exit: A configurational perspective on young technology firms

Research Summary Successful exits are important outcomes for young technology firms. Research has investigated how individual resources affect exit, but both foundational RBV scholarship and newer microfoundations work suggest the need to examine resource configurations in specific contexts. Using an abductive approach and fsQCA methodology, we explore how resource configurations affect exit in the U.S. minimally invasive medical device industry. We find no single resource is necessary or sufficient for exit. Instead, we find four unique equifinal configurations of resources that are sufficient to support exit in certain contexts. Further, these configurations are largely replicated when we distinguish specific exit modes (IPO vs. acquisition). This study advances growing conversations on the role of resource configurations in entrepreneurship with an emphasis on interdependence, complexity, and equifinality of exit. Managerial Summary New firms' early resource portfolios are powerful determinants of their future success. No theory exists, however, to predict if or how the combinations of these resources affect young technology ventures' abilities to achieve a successful exit—an outcome important to founders and early investors. In this study, we utilize fsQCA to explore this issue on a sample of startups in a segment of the U.S. medical device industry. We focus on configurations of technological, commercial, social, human, and financial capital as well as the external environment. Our results point to four unique paths that support successful exit. Each configuration includes multiple ingredients for success. This suggests that realizing successful exit is more complex than previously thought as several unique resource configurations support successful exit