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2005, Academy of Management Review
Coordination is the process people use to create, adapt, and re-create organizations. We propose a theory of coordination as energy-in-conversation to help organizational scholars comprehend the emotional and motivational dynamics of coordination. Our model describes how people generate and diminish their energy in their attempts to coordinate, how this energy affects attempts to coordinate, and how coordinating affects the effort devoted to the activities in the process. This account of the coordination process presents a new approach for understanding performance in interdependent situations.
Annals of the International Communication Association, 2015
JITTA : Journal of Information Technology Theory & Application,, 2016
In this paper, we suggest a new conceptualization of coordination in the information systems (IS) domain. The conceptualization builds on neurobiological predispositions for coordinating actions. We assume that human evolution has led to the development of a neurobiological substrate that enables individuals to coordinate everyday actions. At heart, we discuss six activity modalities: contextualization, objectivation, spatialization, temporalization, stabilization, and transition. Specifically, we discuss that these modalities need to collectively function for successful coordination. To illustrate as much, we apply our conceptualization to important IS research areas, including project management and interface design. Generally, our new conceptualization holds value for coordination research on all four levels of analysis that we identified based on reviewing the IS literature (i.e., group, intra-organization, inter-organization, and IT artifact). In this way, our new approach, grounded in neurobiological findings, provides a high-level theory to explain coordination success or coordination failure and, hence, is independent from a specific level of analysis. From a practitioner’s perspective, the conceptualization provides a guideline for designing organizational interventions and IT artifacts. Because social initiatives are essential in multiple IS domains (e.g., software development, implementation of enterprise systems) and because the design of collaborative software tools is an important IS topic, this paper contributes to a fundamental phenomenon in the IS domain and does so from a new conceptual perspective.
Papeles del …, 2011
Organization Science, 2012
T his paper uses a practice perspective to study coordinating as dynamic activities that are continuously created and modified in order to enact organizational relationships and activities. It is based on the case of Servico, an organization undergoing a major restructuring of its value chain in response to a change in government regulation. In our case, the actors iterate between the abstract concept of a coordinating mechanism referred to as end-to-end management and its performance in practice. They do this via five performative-ostensive cycles: (1) enacting disruption, (2) orienting to absence, (3) creating elements, (4) forming new patterns, and (5) stabilizing new patterns. These cycles and the relationships between them constitute a process model of coordinating. This model highlights the importance of absence in the coordinating process and demonstrates how experiencing absence shapes subsequent coordinating activity.
Journal of the European Economic Association, 2007
We study manager-employee interactions in experiments set in a corporate environment where payoffs depend on employees coordinating at high effort levels; the underlying game being played repeatedly by employees is a weak-link game. In the absence of managerial intervention subjects invariably slip into coordination failure. To overcome a history of coordination failure, managers have two instruments at their disposal, increasing employees' financial incentives to coordinate and communication with employees. We find that communication is a more effective tool than incentive changes for leading organizations out of performance traps. Examining the content of managers' communication, the most effective messages specifically request a high effort, point out the mutual benefits of high effort, and imply that employees are being paid well.
This paper introduces human breathing as a metaphor for thinking about individual contributing to organizational coordination. It extends the information processing view commonly found in structure and process based social cognition theories. These theories need extension, as they cannot adequately explain current phenomena like organizational improvisation and breakdowns. Following the canons of metaphorical theory development, the research develops a conceptual model consisting of six principles: (1) breathing as an ongoing activity, (2) breathing connects individuals with their surroundings, (3) breathing is a complex, internal activity, (4) breathing involves multiple aspects of a human, (5) breathing relies on multiple interrelated structures, and it blends structure and process, and (6) breathing is adaptive within bounds. These six principles are compared with findings from current theory, and applied to an example of organizational coordination from a sports match. The paper...
DRUID Working Papers, 1999
Important aspects of leadership behavior can be rendered intelligible through a focus on coordination games. The concept of common knowledge is shown to be particularly important to understanding leadership. Thus, leaders may establish common knowledge conditions and assist the coordination of strategies in this way, or make decisions in situations where coordination problems persist in spite of common knowledge.
2005
Theorizing on organizational routines has grown rapidly as an area of organization research (Nelson, and Winter, 1982; Pentland, and Rueter, 1994; Feldman, and Pentland, 2003). Modern societies depend on routines for safety, health, transportation, transaction processing, and entertainment. Routines are defined as “the habitual or mechanical performance of an established procedure”(Webster, 1992).
The aim of this paper is to explore the connection between SAP, cognition and emotion from a distributed and ecological angle, with a specific focus on temporality, i.e. how temporal structures connect practitioners, praxis and practice in interaction. In so doing, we argue that the dynamics of strategizing — i.e., the action of engaging, manipulating, and eventually adopting an idea of strategy (however defined) — cannot be fully understood and explained without a social and systemic idea of cognition.
American Economic Review, 2006
We study how financial incentives can be used to overcome a history of coordination failure using controlled laboratory experiments. Subjects' payoffs depend on coordinating at high effort levels. In an initial phase, the benefits of coordination are low, and play typically converges to an inefficient outcome. We then explore varying financial incentives to coordinate at a higher effort level. An increase in the benefits of coordination leads to improved coordination, but large increases have no more impact than small increases. Once subjects have coordinated on a higher effort level, reductions in the incentives to coordinate have little effect on behavior.
ACM Computing Surveys, 1994
This survey characterizes an emerging research area, sometimes called coordination theory , that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordination from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations research, economics, linguistics, and psychology. A key insight of the framework presented here is that coordination can be seen as the process of managing dependencies among activities. Further progress, therefore, should be possible by characterizing different kinds of dependencies and identifying the coordination processes that can be used to manage them. A variety of processes are analyzed from this perspective, and commonalities across disciplines are identified. Processes analyzed include those for managing shared resources, producer/consumer relationships, simultaneity constraints , and task/subtask dependencies . Section 3 summarizes ways of applying a coordination perspective in three di...
2008
Abstract: Modern and future visions of command and control (C2) pose new theoretical and practical issues. These adaptive, rapidly reconfigurable, and distributed organizational structures rely on developing and maintaining shared awareness between interdependent components (ie, individuals or teams working towards shared goals). The science of teams has been an effective theoretical driver for understanding and promoting effectiveness in traditional C2.
2004
Abstract Coordination–commonly defined as the achievement of concerted action-has been a phenomenon of central concern to organizational theorizing since the 1920s. Until the 1980s, information processing and contingency theorists have shaped coordination theory around the relationship between coordination mechanisms and drivers like task dependence, uncertainty, and equivocality.
Center for Coordination Science, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1991
This paper characterizes a new research area, called coordination theory, that focuses on the interdisciplinary study of coordination. Research in this area uses and extends ideas about coordination from disciplines such as computer science, organization theory, operations research, economics, linguistics, and psychology. In the framework presented here, coordination is analyzed in terms of actors performing interdependent activities that achieve goals. A variety of processes are analyzed from this perspective and commonalities across disciplines are identified. Processes analyzed include goal decomposition, resource allocation, synchronization, group decisionmaking, communication, and the perception of common objects. A major section of the paper summarizes recent applications of coordination theory in three different domains: (1) understanding the effects of information technology on human organizations and markets, (2) designing cooperative work tools, and (3) designing distributed and parallel processing computer systems. In the final section of the paper, elements of a research agenda in this new area are briefly outlined.
2014
The goals for OSWC 2010 include topics relating to assessing variance and equifinality in firm performance; how organizational capabilities can be leveraged to enhance innovation, change, adaptation etc., and how some firms have the ability to adapt successfully and “reinvent themselves”. Along these lines, Daft and Lewin (1993, p. iv) challenged the field to develop, amongst other areas, a deeper understanding of how organizational processes create intangibles such energy in organizations. Toward this end we present a multilevel theory of organizational energy (OE). Our proposed theory builds on existing resource-based views of organizations by developing the generating sources of human energy that serve to promote the transformation of organizational resources into capabilities that provide competitive advantage. Taking a systems approach, OE links macro-level organizational aspects to micro and meso-level foundations from the fields of psychology, leadership, and organizational b...
2006
Coordination languages and models like Linda and Reo have been developed in computer science to coordinate the interaction among components and objects, and are nowadays used to model and analyze organizations too. Moreover, organizational concepts are used to enrich the existing coordination languages and models. We describe this research area of "organization and coordination" by presenting definitions, examples, and future research directions. We highlight two issues. First, we argue for a study of value-based rather than information-based coordination languages to model the coordination of autonomous agents and organizations. Second, we argue for a study of the balance between enforced control and trust-based anticipation to deal with security aspects in the coordination of organizations.
Journal of Information Technology, 1993
Organizational productivity can be maximized by creating, using and maintaining structural and dynamic configurations of multi-participant interaction. The technology provided to this end comprises a large variety of systems whose focus is on supporting cooperation of multiple interactive participants, rather that on enhancing the work of the individual. From recent research, however, it is evident that coordination technology is one of the least developed areas in this field, despite the increased need for supporting coordination of joint tasks. The present paper highlights a number of areas for consideration that arise when studying coordination within an organizational setting. The focus of the analysis is on two types of tasks: decision-making tasks and routine office processes. The paper argues that a number of (conflicting) options exist when developing the coordination aspects of group systems; they are classified across the following axes: specification and implementation of coordination; use of sychronous and asychronous working phases; information exchange and information sharing; support of sequential and concurrent processing; support of negotiation and conflict resolution; support of analytical modelling; and description of the organizational environment.
2018
Most research examining the influence of coordination on team performance has not distinguished between coordinating (the processes by which teams attempt to manage interdependencies among individuals) and the resultant state of coordination (the degree to which interdependencies are managed well). Similarly, most research has not distinguished between the state of coordination and the performance outcomes that are often influenced by coordination. We demonstrate the usefulness of these distinctions in a study of 50 teams engaged in a realistic 14-week management simulation. Results using a panel design show that two processes for coordinating (use of shared cognition about the distribution of expertise within the team, and working together for a longer time period) improved coordination. Shared cognition seemed to compensate for low levels of communication and lack of working together. The resulting coordination, in turn, directly influenced teams' financial performance and ext...
Journal of organization design, 2018
Organization design is a major factor determining an organization's performance and how the people work together in these organizations. In the paper, we argue that designing organizations should be scientific-based and forward-looking. This raises challenges in designing organizations in contexts and situations that are new and have not been seen before. Experimentation of what is and what might be is the basis for exploring and examining what makes a good science for organizational design. Experimentation permits us to examine what might be for organization designs, which are not well understood or may not exist yet. Collaborative communities, new ventures, agile organizations, and temporary organizations are examples; experimentation permits us explore and examine what is and what might be and to examine the organizational design problem and perform experiments to understand the relationship between structure and coordination mechanisms of information, communications, decisions, trust, and incentives-the basis for the multi-contingency theory of organizational design. An organizational design must specify the fit between the structure of division of tasks in the organization with its coordination, or how to make these tasks work in concert. These tasks can be interdependent and uncertain. To design good organizations, we need empirical evidence about what is and exploration about what might be; we need a good theoretical basis for being able to generalize our knowledge. To illustrate our point, we examine two experiments on the classic M-form hypothesis-a computer simulation that examines coordination, organization structure, and interdependency and a laboratory experiment that examines the effect of incentives on opportunism and performance. Together, we find that the M-form is a robust organizational design, but with contingent conditions. Finally, we discuss how observation and experimentation together is the foundation for the development of scientific-based theory of organizational design.
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