Positional embeddedness in a community source software development project network: the importance of relationship intensity

This study examines those job and relationship characteristics that explain the positional embeddedness of individuals working in a multi‐organization project network. The analysis focuses differentially on three levels of relationship intensiveness: communication, coordination, and collaboration. Data were collected on the work relationships of 46 technical and administrative personnel involved in the Kuali Financial System, a community source software development project involving 12 organizations, 10 of which were colleges and universities, spread across the United States. Results were generally supportive of the hypotheses. Specifically, positional embeddedness was explained by characteristics of the project worker including the task performed, time spent on the task, and influence, as well as the ease of access to others. There was, however, little consistency in the explanatory power of these factors when comparing across levels of relationship intensity. Findings have implications for design of complex research and development projects that involve interactions across multiple organizations.     

Technology Adoption in Online Social Networks

With the advances of information technology, online social networks are becoming increasingly important venues for technology adoption. However, although the dynamics of technology adoption in real world social networks have been well documented, technology adoption in online social networks remains relatively under‐explored. This study identifies the differences between online and offline social networks and proposes a framework to investigate the dynamics of technology adoption in online social networks. To illustrate the proposed research framework, this study employs behavior‐link panel data obtained from an open source software (OSS) development network to examine how online social networks affect the adoption of Subversion, the latest OSS version control technology. Based on social network theory, co‐membership is used to construct online social networks within the OSS development network. Methodologically, this study takes advantage of the panel dataset and addresses the issues of simultaneity and individual heterogeneity that frequently confound the relationship between network structure and adoption decision, and as a result it demonstrates a more compelling relationship between social networks and technology adoption. The results of this study reveal that social networks are major conduits for technology adoption in an online social network in terms of imitation, leadership, lock‐in, similarity, recency, and team size effects. In online social networks, one's decision to adopt a new technology is strongly influenced by the actions of the connected others. Project leaders have a stronger influence over other members in technology adoption decision making, even in informal virtual teams where traditional governance structures do not apply. Older projects exhibit stronger inertia and thus lack innovativeness. Similarities among projects facilitate faster adoption, and the effect of leadership attenuates in the networks with increasing project dissimilarity. Recent adoptions of technology within the networks, rather than more distant ones, have a stronger impact on subsequent adoption, implying the salience of memory over usage confidence, and increased size of a project team accelerates the rate of adoption. These results help in understanding the dynamics of technology adoption in online social networks, and provide useful guidelines for firms to promote technology and product innovation.     

Coordination at different stages of the product design process

This paper addresses the following question: how does the coordination challenge faced by managers change over the life of time bound projects such as product design. We use coordination structure, an approach to modeling organizational situations that highlights concurrent responsibility interdependencies rather than the more traditional task interdependencies. We explain coordination structure and use it to capture the responsibility interdependencies in a sample of complex system design projects drawn from two different organizations. We use this data: to illustrate the differences possible in the responsibility interdependencies that can exist within design projects from different organizations and at different project key points; to identify a set of four basic modules, or groupings, of responsibility interdependencies useful for modeling design organizations; and to generate a set of testable hypotheses on how the coordination challenge faced by project managers can vary between organizations and over project key points.     

Sourcing decisions of project tasks with exponential completion times: Impact on operating profits

When managing a project, a firm must evaluate multiple strategic factors and operational issues before deciding which tasks to keep in-house and which to outsource. We focus on one operational aspect of this evaluation process by examining the impact of different sourcing decisions of project tasks with exponential completion times on operating profits. As an initial attempt, we present two stylized models that capture two simplest types of projects: (a) a project with two “parallel” tasks that can be performed simultaneously and (b) a project with two “serial” tasks that must be performed sequentially. For each model, we determine the optimal operating profit for the case when the firm outsources zero task, one task, or two tasks. These operating profits can be informative for making sourcing decisions of different project tasks.     

New Product Development: Impact of Project Characteristics and Development Practices on Performance

Concurrent product development process and integrated product development teams have emerged as the two dominant new product development (NPD) “best practices” in the literature. Yet empirical evidence of their impact on product development success remains inconclusive. This paper draws upon organizational information processing theory (OIPT) to explore how these two dominant NPD best practices and two key aspects of NPD project characteristics (i.e., project uncertainty and project complexity) directly and jointly affect the NPD performance. Contrary to the “best practice” literature, the analysis, based on 266 NPD projects from three industries (i.e., automotive, electronics, and machinery) across nine countries (i.e., Austria, Finland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Sweden, and the United States), found no evidence of any direct impact of process concurrency or team integration on overall NPD performance. Instead, there is evidence of negative impact of the interaction between project uncertainty and concurrent NPD process and positive impact of the interaction between project complexity and team integration on overall NPD performance. Moreover, the study found no evidence of any direct negative impact of project uncertainty or complexity on overall NPD performance as suggested in the literature, but found evidence of a direct positive relationship between project complexity and overall NPD performance. The practical implications of these results are significant. First, neither process concurrency nor team integration should be embraced universally as best practice. Second, process concurrency should be avoided in projects with high uncertainty (i.e., when working with unfamiliar product, market, or technology). Finally, team integration should be encouraged for complex product development projects. For a simple product a loosely integrated team or a more centralized decision process may work well. However, as project complexity increases, team integration becomes essential for improved product development. There is no one‐size‐fits‐all solution for managing NPD projects. The choice of a product development practice should be determined by the project characteristics.     

The influence of material resources on innovation projects: the role of resource elasticity

More (rather than fewer) material resources are thought to be the key driver in innovation project performance. Recent empirical evidence, however, suggests that the influence of material resource availability on innovation projects is not as simple and straightforwardly positive as it may seem. We build on the concept of an innovation project team's resource elasticity to disentangle the material resource–innovation output conundrum. This concept is analogous to the marketing concept of price elasticity and points to four types of innovation project teams based on their resource elasticity: In resource‐elastic teams, the relationship between material resources and innovation outcomes is positive (hence, they are ‘resource driven’ when able to dispose of adequate material resources or ‘resource victims’ when lacking these material resources). In contrast, and as a significant departure from previous work, resource‐inelastic teams show no or even a negative relationship between material resource adequacy and team performance (thus, the teams are ‘resourceful’ if they can perform with limited material resources or ‘resource burners’ if they show low success with adequate material resources). Because neither adequate nor inadequate material resources seem to be a reliable predictor of success, we synthesize empirical research efforts that point to each team type's key characteristics to derive novel implications for managing innovation projects.     

The direct and indirect effects of core and peripheral social capital on organizational performance

Research summary : In this paper we adopt a core‐periphery approach to specify the direct and indirect effects of social capital on organizational performance. We suggest that social capital deriving from stable task relationships between organizational members has a direct positive effect on organizational performance. Said effect depends, in both strength and functional form, on whether actors involved in stable dyads are located at the core or at the periphery of the organization. We also argue that core and peripheral social capital affect performance indirectly by moderating the organization's ability to leverage its human capital to improve performance. Results from a 48‐year study of the National Basketball Association support our arguments and bear important implications for strategic human resource practices and organizational performance in competitive settings. Managerial summary : Stable work relationships among employees generate trust, more efficient work routines, common understanding and thus higher organizational performance. These benefits depend on the location of such stable relationships in the organization. Relational stability among core organizational members has an immediate, strong impact on performance, an effect that plateaus as stability grows. Stable relationships between core and peripheral members have instead a weaker, yet linear effect on performance. The location of stable relationships is also critical to leverage the talent of core employees, whose contribution to performance is stronger when relational stability is high in the organizational core, yet hindered by stable relations between core and periphery. Such findings provide relevant implications for strategic human resource management, in particular for choices regarding team composition and managing stars. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improving Screening Decision Making through Transactive Memory Systems: A Field Study

In screening decisions, senior managers from various disciplines need to collaborate to evaluate innovation project proposals and decide about the allocation of scarce resources to selected projects. Screening decisions are complex and made under high levels of uncertainty, and are considered to be one of senior management's most challenging tasks. In the present field study, screening decision making is investigated from the perspective of a Transactive Memory System (TMS). TMS theory explains how cross‐disciplinary groups of people in interdependent relationships gain, store, combine, and utilize their knowledge in solving complex problems. According to this theory, a TMS emerges to the extent that team members manage to synchronize three core socio‐cognitive processes—specialization, building credibility, and coordination—to achieve team objectives. A theoretical model summarizing antecedents and consequences of the emergence of a TMS in a screening context is proposed and investigated using structural equation modeling. Data from 136 screening committees were used. Results show that the degree to which a committee acts as a TMS is positively related to decision‐making effectiveness as well as efficiency in a screening context. Transformational leadership and an open organizational climate are shown to act as antecedents of TMS emergence. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.     

Implications of internal organization structure for firm boundaries

Knowledge issues are central to governance choice. Organization structure influences knowledge flows and costs of knowledge creation and exchange inside the firm. Yet the question of how a firm's internal structure affects its governance choice for new activities has received scant empirical attention. We examine the role of internal structure, specifically unit autonomy and lateral coordination, in a firm's governance decision for new, knowledge‐intensive activities. The findings show that internal structure is a ‘shift parameter’ that affects governance choice by moderating the relationship between task complexity and degree of integration. The empirical setting is the U.S. banking industry and its adoption of Internet banking. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does Strategic Planning Enhance or Impede Innovation and Firm Performance?*

Does strategic planning enhance or impede innovation and firm performance? The current literature provides contradictory views. This study extends the resource‐advantage theory to examine the conditions in which strategic planning increases or decreases the number of new product development projects and firm performance. The authors test the theoretical model by collecting data from 227 firms. The empirical evidence suggests that more strategic planning and more new product development (NPD) projects lead to better firm performance. Firms with organizational redundancy benefit more from strategic planning than firms with less organizational redundancy. Increasing R&D intensity boosts both the number of NPD projects and firm performance. Strategic planning is more effective in larger firms with higher R&D intensity for increasing the number of NPD projects. The results reported in this study also consist of several findings that challenge the traditional views of strategic planning. The evidence suggests that strategic planning impedes, not enhances, the number of NPD projects. Larger firms benefit less, not more, from strategic planning for improving firm performance. Larger firms do not necessarily create more NPD projects. Increasing organizational redundancy has no effect on the number of NPD projects. These empirical results provide important strategic implications. First, managers should be aware that, in general, formal strategic planning decreases the number of NPD projects for innovation management. Improvised rather than planned activities are more conducive to creating NPD project ideas. Moreover, innovations tend to emerge from improvisational processes, during which the impromptu execution of NPD activities without planning spurs “thinking outside the box,” which enhances the process of creating NPD project ideas. Therefore, more flexible strategic plans that accommodate potential improvisation may be needed in NPD management since innovation‐related activities cannot be planned precisely due to the unexpected jolts and contingencies of the NPD process. Second, large firms with high levels of R&D intensity can overcome the negative effect of strategic planning on the number of NPD projects. Specifically, a firm's abundant resources, when allocated and deployed for NPD activities, signal the high priority and importance of the NPD activities and thus motivate employees to acquire, collect, and gather customer and technical knowledge, which leads to creating more NPD projects. Finally, managers must understand that managing strategic planning and generating NPD project ideas are beneficial to the ultimate outcome of firm performance despite the adverse relationship between strategic planning and the number of NPD projects.     

Network dynamics and knowledge transfer in virtual organisations

Employing a model of knowledge spillovers, we find empirical evidence consistent with both direct and indirect spillovers among open source software projects. We further find that programmers who work on many other projects have a positive effect on the success of a project beyond the effect they have on connectivity of the network. We also find that, both “modifications” and “additions” are positively associated with project success.     

Problem‐formulation and problem‐solving in self‐organized communities: How modes of communication shape project behaviors in the free open‐source software community

Research summary: Building on the problem‐solving perspective, we study behaviors related to projects and the communication‐based antecedents of such behaviors in the free open‐source software (FOSS) community. We examine two kinds of problem/project‐behaviors: Individuals can set up projects around the formulation of new problems or join existing projects and define and/or work on subproblems within an existing problem. The choice between these two behaviors is influenced by the mode of communication. A communication mode with little a priori structure is the best mode for communicating about new problems (i.e., formulating a problem); empirically, it is associated with project launching behaviors. In contrast, more structured communication fits subproblems better and is related to project joining behaviors. Our hypotheses derive support from data from the FOSS community. Managerial summary: We study how the way in which individuals communicate influence the project‐behaviors they engage in. We find that relatively unstructured communication is associated with the setting up new projects, while communication that is structured around an artifact is associated with joining projects. Our findings hold implications for understanding how management may influence project behaviors and problem‐solving: Firms that need to concentrate on more incremental problem‐solving efforts (e.g., because a sufficient number of attractive problems have already been defined) should create environments in which interaction is undertaken mainly via artifacts. On the other hand, if firms seek to generate new problems (e.g., new strategic opportunities), they should create environments in which open‐ended, verbal conversation is relatively more important than artifact‐based communication. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Coordinating supplier involvement in product development projects: a differentiated coordination typology

Supplier involvement in product development has been a widely discussed theme in recent years. Sometimes, one 'best method' for involvement, derived from studies of one particular industrial context, has been suggested. In this article, however, various forms for coordinating such involvement are distinguished, based on a study of six different product development projects. Three main approaches are formulated and discussed: project integration coordination, disconnected sub-project coordination, and ad hoc coordination. Based on the empirical study and the literature, the drivers of different types of supplier coordination are discussed. Several managerial implications are suggested related to the need to differentiate inter-organizational coordination, not only from project to project but also throughout a project. The importance of taking into account short-term, project-based drivers as well as long-term strategic objectives of supplier coordination is also discussed.     

How Teamwork Matters More as Team Member Dispersion Increases*

Product development teams become increasingly dispersed because innovative project tasks require the input of specialized knowledge at multiple locations. Prior analyses indicate that as team member dispersion increases teams find it more difficult to perform high‐quality teamwork. Moreover, the literature has largely assumed that the performance effect of teamwork in innovative projects would be driven by the nature of the project task and that this would be true regardless of the degree to which team members were co‐located. The present study argues, however, that teamwork affects team performance more strongly as team member dispersion increases. Two main reasons for this are discussed: (1) High‐quality teamwork can leverage the increased knowledge potential of dispersed teams; and (2) team leaders in more dispersed teams have little possibility to compensate low‐quality teamwork through hands‐on leadership. Responses from 575 managers, team leaders, and team members of 145 new product development (NPD) projects in the software industry were used to analyze the moderating effect of team member proximity on the relationship between teamwork quality and team performance. Using regression analysis, support is found for the initial hypothesis that team member dispersion moderates the relationship between teamwork quality and team performance, that is, that increasing team member dispersion increases the positive impact of teamwork quality on team performance. As such, the present analysis advances understanding of dispersed teams, showing that teamwork quality not only is more difficult to achieve but also is more critical to team performance as team dispersion increases. Furthermore, low‐proximity teams can reach higher levels of effectiveness and efficiency than co‐located ones if they manage to achieve high levels of teamwork over distance. Thus, team dispersion may well be an opportunity and should not just be regarded as a liability to be overcome or avoided. This research recognizes that the vast majority of teams are neither perfectly co‐located nor perfectly virtual. There are many shades of gray between these two extremes, and various individual, team, task, and contextual characteristics may have an effect on how decreases—however small—in geographical proximity affect the process and performance of teams. Future research is encouraged to address such factors at different levels of analysis aimed at providing managers with recommendations for dispersed teamwork.     

Do development projects crowd-out private sector activities? Evidence from contract farming participation in Northern Ghana

Contract farming (CF) is attractive as a possible private sector-led strategy for improving market coordination and smallholder farmers’ welfare. At the same time, governmental and non-governmental development projects aimed at improving farmers’ welfare continue to be organized. It is not uncommon for CF activities and development projects to take place in the same communities. Yet so far there is no evidence on how development projects affect CF activities. We examine factors affecting entry in and exit from different maize CF schemes in Northern Ghana, and focus specifically on the role of development projects. We find that the presence of agricultural development projects in the community is associated with lower scheme entry, but this not the case for non-agricultural projects. CF exit is more strongly associated with maize projects, but not significantly with non-maize or non-agricultural projects. Thus, our findings do not support concerns of a general moral hazard problem arising from the presence of any development project, but indicate possible negative associations of more closely related agricultural or maize projects with maize CF participation.     

Exploring the Motivational and Behavioral Foundations of External Technology Experts’ Knowledge Sharing in Collaborative R&D Projects: The Contingency Role of Project Formalization

High‐tech manufacturers increasingly rely on the knowledge contributions of external technology experts (ETEs), who contribute to collaborative R&D projects on behalf of suppliers. Many scholars have considered knowledge sharing in R&D collaborations from a firm‐level or project‐level perspective and focused on formalization as a potential remedy. While individual supplier employees at the operative level make the decision to share critical knowledge, the individual‐level perspective in literature on knowledge sharing in collaborative R&D projects is virtually nonexistent. Because knowledge sharing in collaborative R&D is a largely discretionary act on behalf of the supplier employee, personal motivations rather than inter‐firm relationship elements (e.g., network position or dependency) become the primary determinant of one’s sharing behavior. Abstracting from or ignoring these motivations of supplier employees in studies on collaborative R&D may obscure important insights for R&D managers. This study is an important first step in providing the empirical evidence needed to uncover the motivational and behavioral foundations for ETEs’ knowledge sharing in a collaborative R&D setting. Building on theories of gift and social exchange, this article identifies customer stewardship and distributive fairness as two important personal motivations of ETEs to share knowledge. Project formalization is considered as a key contingency condition. Analyzing survey responses of 186 ETEs, a multilevel regression‐based moderated‐mediation analysis of direct and indirect effects shows that customer stewardship predicts an ETE’s knowledge sharing behavior under (very) low levels of project formalization, and distributive fairness predicts knowledge sharing behavior under medium to high levels of formalization. Together, the results provide R&D project managers who aim to leverage external knowledge contributions with valuable insights that have been obscured in past firm‐level collaborative R&D studies.     

An investigation into the managerial roles and career paths of gatekeepers and project supervisors in a major R & D facility

This study investigates the role of gatekeepers in the transfer of information within a single R&D location by comparing directly the performance of project groups with and without gatekeepers. The results show that gatekeepers performed a linking role only for projects performing tasks that were 'locally-oriented' while 'universally-oriented' tasks were most effectively linked to external areas by direct project member communication. Gatekeepers also appear to facilitate external communication by their locally-oriented project colleagues. A follow-up study five years later showed that almost all gatekeeping project leaders had been promoted up the managerial ladder; in contrast, one half of the non-gatekeeping project leaders had ascended the technical ladder. This implies that higher managerial levels demand strong interpersonal as well as technical skills.     

Shared knowledge and product design glitches in integrated product development

Product development processes based on the joint collaboration of the cross-functional team, suppliers, and customers can minimize project glitches. Glitches in the product development project can cause project cost over-runs and delay a project past when first mover advantages are possible. While previous theoretical work has suggested a negative relationship between shared knowledge and product development glitches, empirical studies have not identified how different types of shared knowledge are associated with each other and the design glitches. This study proposes a model of the relationship between specific types of shared knowledge and design glitches in integrated product development (IPD) projects. We test our model using a sample of 191 projects from the automotive industry in the United States. The major findings were that: (1) shared knowledge of the development process can be built by improving a team's shared knowledge of customers, suppliers, and internal capabilities, (2) shared knowledge of the development process for a project reduces product design glitches, and (3) reduced product design glitches improve product development time, cost, and customer satisfaction.     

IS THE GENERAL PUBLIC LICENCE A RATIONAL CHOICE?*

Open source projects are networks of developers, distributors and end‐users of non‐proprietary created knowledge goods. It has been argued that this form of organization has some advantages over the firm or market coordination. I show that for sufficiently convex and modular projects, proprietary licences are not able to sustain sequential knowledge production which, however, can be carried out if the project is run on the open source basis.     

基于WBS的建设工程监理动态控制研究

建设工程监理是一种以严密制度为特征的综合管理行为,传统的管理模式已不能胜任现代工程的新特点。为了合理地进行计划、组织、协调、控制,监理企业必须结合现代工程项目的管理方法,充分利用现代项目管理软件进行控制。文中引入项目管理的系统方法,采用工作分解结构（WBS）方法,对工程项目进行分解,提出一种监理工作的明确表示法。在此基础上结合P3e／c的项目管理信息系统,实现建设工程监理的动态控制。