The Evolution of Globally-Distributed Teams: Organizational Learning and the role of Information Technology

在美国国家科学基金会创新与组织变革项目的支持下，本研究重点关注了虚拟全球团队中有助于组织团队合作的社会和技术因素。它围绕着几个广泛的问题，解决理论和实践者的关注：全球团队如何发展，以分享认知经验，交流和内化彼此的隐性知识，并合作的方式，有助于业绩？ 什么样的条件能促成这种转变？先进的信息技术在全球团队的发展过程中，特别是在组织团队的过程中，扮演着什么样的角色？什么样的技术设计和实施流程能够最好地促进全球团队的协作实践发展，并支持新的知识创造和组织团队合作？ 这些问题是通过定性，比较和定量的方法相结合，采用研究全球团队在福特，摩托罗拉和宝洁公司进行探讨。 研究方法包括民族志实地考察和团队实践的直接观察、定性比较分析、调查研究和统计分析以及模拟建模。研究结果将有助于全球团队跨越文化、时间和空间的界限进行沟通和协调。 研究结果也可以应用到协作团队在教育背景下，多文化合作和利用信息技术的见解。

With Support from the National Science Foundation's Innovation and Organizational Change Program, this research focuses on social and technological factors that contribute to organizational teaming in virtual global teams. It is framed around several broad questions that address both theoretical and practitioner concerns:How do global teams evolve to share cognitive experience, exchange and internalize one another's tacit knowledge, and collaborate in ways that contribute to performance? What conditions enable this transformation?What roles do advanced information technologies play in the evolution of global teams, and especially in the processes of organizational teaming?What technological designs and implementation processes best enable the development of collaborative practices on global teams, and support new knowledge creation and organizational teaming? These questions are explored through a combination of qualitative, comparative, and quantitative methods that are employed to study global teams at Ford, Motorola, and Procter & Gamble. Methodologies include ethnographic fieldwork and direct observation of team practices, qualitative comparative analysis, survey research and statistical analysis, and simulation modeling.The results will help global teams communicate and coordinate their activities across boundaries of culture, time, and space. The findings may also be applied to collaborative teams in an educational context, with insights for multi-cultural collaborations and the utilization of information technology.