The Unexpected Effects of Workplace Connectivity
Description
While investigating how workplace transparency and privacy shape organizational behavior and performance, I wondered about the related effects of workplace connectivity. As new digital tools and organizational forms make it far easier for employees to communicate and interact (and harder for them to avoid doing so), how are patterns of collaboration changing? And what is the impact on complex problem-solving, routines, and performance outcomes? With individuals using technology to span physical, structural, temporal, and other boundaries in organizations, those traditional elements of organizational design are becoming less likely to constrain decisions about who collaborates with whom. As a result, people often experience work relationships as unbounded. How does that, I began to ask, affect learning, control, satisfaction, and productivity?
So I started to build—as a corollary to my transparency work—a body of work to understand the practices and circumstances that make connectivity beneficial or detrimental, while both drawing on and contributing to the literature on social networks and intraorganizational collaboration. As with transparency, I considered whether the value of workplace connectivity should be less defined in good/bad terms and more along a context-driven spectrum (e.g., How much connectivity would be productive given the contingencies at play?). That, in turn, led me to think about what sorts of fluid collaborative structures (which facilitate connectivity in some parts of organizations while limiting it in others) could produce strong performance—and what conditions might allow that to happen. I took a fresh look at theories of how different structures for employee interaction (like the degree of clustering, centralization, or intermittency) affect organizational performance. What structuring mechanisms, I asked, might managers use to dynamically adjust connectivity—in place of more static, traditional approaches to organizational design—to achieve desired outcomes?