Suchergebnisse

As virtual workplaces and homework programs become more common, workers often find themselves inhabiting multiple worlds and multiple roles simultaneously. For these individuals, boundary transitions are both more frequent and more challenging. This paper expands current theory on work-related boundary transitions by: (1) conceptualizing role conflict in the logic of dynamic communication networks, and (2) reconceptualizing ritual and routine behavior in boundary transitions as not simply aids to mental transitions but also as communicative and symbolic performance that is oriented toward other role senders. Underlying the framework is the concept of time-space paths (Giddens, 1979; Heidegger, 1996) as critical elements of role boundary identification and demarcation. This paper contributes to a better understanding of boundary issues for homeworkers by using a communication framework and emphasizing the agency that homeworkers have to mold others' expectations.

We introduce this Special Issue by providing an overview of the interplay between communication technology and various dimensions of new organizational forms. We consider the major factors motivating dramatic change within and between organizations today, and describe key dimensions of intraorganizational and interorganizational forms that are linked to electronic communication technologies: vertical control, horizontal coordination, size of organization and constituent units, new types of coupling, core product, communication cultures, ownership and control, interorganizational coupling, strategic alliances, and interstitial linking. Our purpose is to sample the changes attendant upon advances in electronic communication and organizational forms, with the goal of energizing future research. Our overview uncovers possibilities for new avenues of study within the technology-organization relationship and reveals the important contributions made by the articles in this Special Issue.

The study investigated the effects of perceived media richness and social influences from organizational colleagues on the uses and assessments of electronic mail in a large research and development organization. A social network composed of an individual (ego), supervisor, and five close communication partners was used to model relational social influences. Responses reported by network members were incorporated into a structural equation system to predict each ego's perceptions, assessments, and usage of electronic mail. Survey data were supplemented by in-depth interviews. The study found: (a) Perceived electronic mail richness (1) varied across individuals and (2) covaried with relational social influences and with media experience factors; (b) perceived electronic mail richness predicted individuals' electronic mail assessments and usage; (c) social influences of colleagues had pervasive effects on others' media assessments. The study demonstrated that an explicit consideration of social influences aids understanding of how individuals perceive and use new information technology.

This study developed a cross-level model to study the effects of contextual factors, including team-level conflict and team-level emotion management (EM), on how individual team members seek information. Cross-level analysis using data collected from 175 individuals in 30 teams showed that team-level relationship conflict (TRC) had a negative effect on individual information seeking (IS) behavior, whereas team-level task conflict (TTC) did not have a significant effect. EM at both team and individual levels had positive effects on individual IS behavior. The same set of analyses conducted using a subset of 22 of these teams at an earlier time point confirmed the same pattern of relationships. In addition, team-level EM interacted with TRC in influencing individual IS behavior, although the patterns varied for the two time points of data collection. Theoretical implications are discussed.

This article develops a constrained choice model of strategic decision-making for `cupid' alliances. Unlike voluntary alliances, cupid alliances are forged between `target' organizations at the behest of a third `cupid' organization that stands to benefit from creation of the alliance. Three key alliance decisions — whether to partner, with whom, and governance — are substantially curtailed by the cupid's requirements, producing a severely constrained set of strategic decisions. The conceptual model is supplemented with a case study which relies on qualitative interviews, observations and communication network data collected from principals negotiating a cupid alliance. A finding which may be unique to cupid alliances was the decline in trust over the course of the negotiation between those representatives whose organizations had no past alliance relationships. This finding is especially interesting given the fact that despite the decreased propensity for representatives to trust, an agreement was still reached.

This research tested a transactive theory model of how individuals allocate and retrieve task-related information in work teams. It extended prior research by exploring the role of communal information repositories in the context of human information resources. Structural equation modeling of six integrated hypotheses revealed several significant results. First, usage of information repositories was significantly related to individual access to information. However, the relationship between individual direct information exchange with team members (the human repositories) and individual access to information was significant only among average-level users of organizational information repositories. Second, development of individual expertise directories significantly influenced individual direct information exchange with team members. Third, perceived usage of organizational information repositories by team members significantly influenced actual usage. Finally, technology-specific competence in using intranets significantly influenced the actual usage of intranets as organizational information repositories.

In organizational settings, a communication dilemma exists whenever the interests of a collective (i.e., team, organization, interorganizational alliance) demand that people share privately held information, but their individual interests insteadmotivate them to withholdit. This article develops andtests an expectancy model that predicts specific conditions under which collective benefits can be made to converge with private ones, thus resolving communication dilemmas and motivating voluntary contributions to a collectively shared database. In the model, motivation is a multiplicative function of individual-level attitudes and beliefs: (a) organizational commitment; (b) organizational instrumentality, an instrumentality that links successful collective information sharing to broader organizational gain; (c) connective efficacy, an expectation that information contributedto the database will reach other members of the collective; and(d) information self-efficacy, the self-perceivedvalue of a contributor's information to other database users. The model was tested by a survey administered to members of an intact work team using a discretionary database. The multiplicative model was significant and explained sizeable amounts of variance in the motivation to contribute discretionary information. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. The model can be readily extended to predict information sharing by means of other communication media.