团队协作是提升当今企业竞争力的重要环节。信息通信技术的发展和企业全球化的布局使人们比以前更容易以分布式而不是以面对面的方式参与团队工作，促使虚拟团队成为现代企业流行的组织模式。然而，高度虚拟化的知识型团队面临着一项独特挑战：对团队成员的复杂知识工作进行跨时空的协调，也就是知识协同问题。这一议题已经引起国内外学者和企业管理人士的广泛关注。本项目的总体目标是推进对这一议题的研究。本课题的切入点是探索虚拟团队知识协同中的数位人工制品(digital artifacts)使用。虽然数位制品，比如各类电子化文档，是支持高度虚拟团队协作的不可或缺的部分，但是相关文献对它们的实际运用以及它们与知识协同以及团队绩效关系的明确解释很有限。本项目的具体目标是从集体构建和边界对象的理论视角来理解数位人工制品在虚拟团队中的使用以及对知识协同和团队绩效的作用。我们计划通过案例分析和问卷调查等定性定量方法展开研究。

Effective team coordination contributes to the competitiveness of contemporary organizations. The advancement of information technologies and globalization of have made virtual teams a major form of organizing in contemporary firms. However, virtual teams, particularly those highly dispersed ones, are facing the unique challenge of coordinating knowledge work among their dispersed workers in order to achieve desired work outcomes, an issue termed knowledge coordination. The broad objective of this project is to advance our understanding of this issue. Our focus is on the use of digital artifacts for knowledge coordination in highly virtual teams. Although we know that technology is essential to supporting coordination in highly dispersed teams, the extant literature is limited in explaining precisely how digital artifacts are used in practice and how they affect knowledge coordination and team performance. Thus, our proejct specifically aims to address this gap by developing the lens of collective structuration and by drawing on the literature on boundary objects. Empirically, we plan to conduct qualitative case studies to build a research model and use the survey method for model validation.