The Emergence of Intra-Organizational Communities of Operations: Evidence from the Software Industry
Location
260-051, Owen G. Glenn Building
Start Date
12-15-2014
Description
We contemplate the concept of intra-organizational communities of operation to account for the organizational design that has recently emerged. Intra-organizational communities of operation address operative tasks of information workers within the boundaries of a firm. By relying on community principles such as self-coordination and intrinsic motivation, this design is believed to be highly scalable and efficient. In order to understand the mechanisms of how these communities function, we develop a research framework aiming to explain performance by means of constructs adapted from conventional group research. We evaluate our model in an empirical study at a large software vendor in its bug tracking process. We find that community centrality, informal roles, and heterogeneity are associated with performance while sub-network centralization and size are not. Our findings will motivate managers to benefit from intra-organizational communities’ flexibility and scalability and assist them in the design process by unveiling the mechanisms that influence performance.
Recommended Citation
Beckhaus, Arne; Neumann, Dirk; and Karg, Lars, "The Emergence of Intra-Organizational Communities of Operations: Evidence from the Software Industry" (2014). ICIS 2014 Proceedings. 35.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2014/proceedings/ISStrategy/35
The Emergence of Intra-Organizational Communities of Operations: Evidence from the Software Industry
260-051, Owen G. Glenn Building
We contemplate the concept of intra-organizational communities of operation to account for the organizational design that has recently emerged. Intra-organizational communities of operation address operative tasks of information workers within the boundaries of a firm. By relying on community principles such as self-coordination and intrinsic motivation, this design is believed to be highly scalable and efficient. In order to understand the mechanisms of how these communities function, we develop a research framework aiming to explain performance by means of constructs adapted from conventional group research. We evaluate our model in an empirical study at a large software vendor in its bug tracking process. We find that community centrality, informal roles, and heterogeneity are associated with performance while sub-network centralization and size are not. Our findings will motivate managers to benefit from intra-organizational communities’ flexibility and scalability and assist them in the design process by unveiling the mechanisms that influence performance.