Teachable Lessons From Virtual Work Research

Teachable Lessons from Virtual Work Research

There is a wealth of published research into virtual work topics. If you have published an article that you think fits into this topic (or use a particular article in your own teaching), please list it here and provide at least a paragraph that describes how the results could inform virtual work education. A quick outline of the mental model or analytical framework that educators would try to impart to students, a suggestion for teaching cases or in-class exercises that can be productively analyzed using the research model, and/or a list of the key lessons for managers and employees that are implicit in the research, could all be helpful.

Cramton, D.C., "Finding Common Ground in Dispersed Collaboration", Organizational Dynamics Summer 2002.

  • Identifies core communication issues that arise in distributed teams as a result of failures in mutual knowledge
  • Can be used to describe core communication failures that plague virtual work, offers useful guidelines for practice
  • Can be used to set up a break-out session amongst students to brainstorm solutions to these problems

McAfee, A.P., "Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration", SMR Spring 2006.

  • Offers a list of features of "2.0" technologies that change the nature of collaboration in organizations: SLATES = Search / Links / Authoring / Tags / Extensions / Signals
  • Can be used as a good primer for new technologies, a discussion of how the structure of organizations is becoming less hierarchical and more driven by ad-hoc collaboration needs, and is a good springboard to the idea of an organization developing a competency at encouraging and managing collaboration, which could be valuable as collaborations extend beyond company boundaries (e.g., see "Wikinomics", Tapscott)

Pauleen, D.P., "Virtual Teams: Projects, Protocols, and Processes", IDEA Group book.

van Genuchten, Vogel, Rutkowski and Saunders, Communications of the AIS, 15/22.

Mulholland, A., et al, "Mashup Corporations: The End of Business as Usual"

Tapscott, D., "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything"

If you are looking for EndNote bibliographies of research related to virtual work, try: