Venue
Program Session #: 1571
Sponsor(s): (OCIS, IM)
Time: Wednesday, Aug 8 2007 8:30AM - 10:20AM
Place: Philadelphia Marriott in Grand Ballroom J
Organizer: Kannan Srikanth; London Business School / University of Southern Denmark;
How do organizations coordinate interdependent activities across geographic distance? Recent developments such as the offshoring of complex and innovative work pose a challenge to our prior theoretical understanding of distributed coordination. The uncertainty inherent in such work does not allow coordination via ex-ante planning, and current IT technologies are not sophisticated enough to allow ongoing mutual adjustment across locations for such complex work. In this symposium we aim to understand how such coordination is achieved on the ground using data from both primary and secondary sources as well as bringing together various strands of literature that have a bearing on this question that have hitherto been unconnected. Cumulatively the papers show the great importance of building mutual knowledge or common ground across locations to achieve coordination and investigate the different mechanisms that firms put in place to build such knowledge.
Click on title to access the paper
Global Strategies, Integrative Mechanisms, and Intra-firm Coordination across Borders
(Paper available from the authors)
Presenter: Mary M. Maloney; U. of St. Thomas; Presenter: Minyuan Zhao; U. of Michigan;
Common Ground as a coordination mechanism across geographic distances and firm boundaries
(Paper available from the author)
Presenter: Kannan Srikanth; London Business School/Univ. Southern Denmark
Collaboration across space: is distance dead and the world flat?
(Florian has withdrawn due to personal reasons)
Presenter: Florian A. Taeube; Imperial College London;
Group Norms and Coordination in Internationally Distributed Teams
(Paper available from the author)
Presenter: Tine Koehler; George Mason U.;
The role of competing subgroups and numerical minorities in geographically distributed teams
(Paper available directly from author)
Presenter: Mark Mortensen; Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
Stay Tuned: Professional Coordination of Distributed Work in Changing Circumstances
(Paper available from the authors)
Presenter: Paul C Van Fenema; Netherlands Defense Academy; Presenter: Paul W. L. Vlaar; Vrije U. Amsterdam; Presenter: Vinay Tiwari; RSM Erasmus U.;