Structures that work: social structure, work structure and coordination ease in geographically distributed teams

  • Authors:

  • Pamela Hinds;Cathleen McGrath

  • Affiliations:

  • Stanford University;Loyola Marymount University

  • Venue:
  • CSCW '06 Proceedings of the 2006 20th anniversary conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

Scholars have recently argued for flatter, organic organizational structures that enable workers to deal more effectively with dynamic and uncertain environments. In a correlational study of 33 R&D teams, we find that although this network form is associated with more smooth coordination in collocated teams, the opposite is true for geographically distributed teams. In fact, an informal hierarchical structure was associated with more smooth coordination in distributed teams. These results add to the scant literature on networks in teams and provide insight into important differences in the structure of geographically distributed and collocated teams.