Search results

The development of information technologies has fueled the emergence of online self-organizing teams that involve members with diverse backgrounds to work on a shared goal voluntarily. However, the differences in members' attributes give rise to diversity. Therefore, the authors’ research is to figure out how diversity affects team performance in the context of online self-organizing teams and how this effect changes over team tenure.

The authors use a dynamic approach to the diversity-team performance relationship and collect a publicly longitudinal dataset on 3,970 collaborative items from 2,550 online self-organizing teams spanning nine years in an open innovation community of an online game.

The empirical results show that culture separation is negatively related to team performance, and this negative relationship weakens as team tenure increases. While skill variety and contribution disparity are positively related to team performance, and these positive relationships strengthen as team tenure increases.

The study provides a research framework to examine the relationship between diversity and team performance and explore how this relationship varies over team tenure in the context of online self-organizing teams. The results not only demonstrate the double-edged role of diversity in affecting the success of online self-organizing teams but also advance the understanding on the temporal effect of diversity on team performance.

Many organisations remain adverse to self-organised teams. The reasons are non-trivial and complex, but it is suspected that not willing to let go to direct control by senior management is at the root cause. There is a perceived security in following traditional, hierarchical chains of command under the guise of reducing risks and maintaining efficiency. The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of a research agenda that will empirically test in the field a range of widely held assumptions around leadership of self-organised teams. In total, 23 companies have agreed to participate in the proposed longitudinal research.

An extensive literature review has identified extant theories, frameworks, and methodologies adopted by researchers to gain greater understanding of self-organised teams. This knowledge will be used as the basis for generating hypotheses for subsequent testing in the field.

There is a considerable knowledge base established for self-organised teams. However, there is limited understanding of the benefits or detrimental effects of self-organised teams on organisational productivity and the appropriate style of leadership. This initial research has identified several hypotheses that will be used to develop questionnaires and instruments for information collection.

The tools and techniques presented in this article need to be adapted to the organisation’s specificities as well as to the contextual situation.

The work is of significant practical use. The research will be completed in a number of companies. There will be continuous input from operational and executive management. The findings from the work will be disseminated through various channels including workshops and conferences. Companies implementing and using self-organised teams will benefit from the knowledge generated.

Self-organised teams are used in a variety of settings – commercial businesses, not-for-profit, NGOs. The work will explore issues around behavioural networks and inter- intra-team relationships.

There is much rhetoric around the adoption and uses of self-organised teams, yet there appears to be little understanding of the effect of leadership style of these teams and effect on productivity. This work will therefore contribute to the understanding of self-organised teams. While prior research has been conducted in the motivational and behavioural implications of self-organised teams, the knowledge is at best scant when leadership models for self-organised teams and operational factors are explored.

The aim of this paper is to explore the possibility of retrieving information with Kohonen self‐organising maps, which are known to be effective to group objects according to their similarity or dissimilarity.

After conventional preprocessing, such as transforming into vector space, documents from a German document collection were trained for a neural network of Kohonen self‐organising map type. Such an unsupervised network forms a document map from which relevant objects can be found according to queries.

Self‐organising maps ordered documents to groups from which it was possible to find relevant targets.

The number of documents used was moderate due to the limited number of documents associated to test topics. The training of self‐organising maps entails rather long running times, which is their practical limitation. In future, the aim will be to build larger networks by compressing document matrices, and to develop document searching in them.

With self‐organising maps the distribution of documents can be visualised and relevant documents found in document collections of limited size.

The paper reports on an approach that can be especially used to group documents and also for information search. So far self‐organising maps have rarely been studied for information retrieval. Instead, they have been applied to document grouping tasks.

In order to deepen the understanding of self-organization, the purpose of the paper is to raise and analyze the state of the art in the area of innovation networks, particularly the characteristics of self-organizing, relying on the theory of complex systems to overcome any shortcomings.

The databases selected for the search were Web of Science and Scopus; the keywords searched in the titles of articles were innovation networks, complex systems, self-organization and self-organizing; the timeline of the search covers the period between 2000 and 2014 due to the presence of important studies in the field of networks starting in the early 2000s; only studies published in English were used; the articles selected were examined by first reading the titles, then the abstracts, and finally the texts in full.

The way the main constructs from the analytical perspective of innovation networks intersect with complex systems explains how self-organization is presented and how it can be allowed to occur within a view of expected benefits for the purposes of these networks.

The originality of the research lies in the questioning of the classical form of organizational management in innovation networks, essentially based on the concentration of hierarchical power.

The purpose of this study is to identify the challenges of low hierarchy and self-organised structures for employees’ learning and competency development at work. In the past decade, interest in employees’ and organisations’ self-directedness has increased. Self-organised structures are perceived as better able to answer to the quickly changing requirements of clients and business environments. Within these structures, employees are expected to take on more responsibility and maintain more control over their workplace learning, which means they must be self-directed and autonomous. An important question for this approach is how can workplace learning and employee competence development be enhanced.

Two self-organised Finnish information and communication technology-companies participated in the study. With the help of data-driven content analysis, 36 interviews were analysed.

Unclear roles, structures and areas of responsibility caused challenges during the guidance and support of learning, for long-term and sustainable professional development possibilities and in organising and prioritizing work tasks related to learning.

In self-organised structures, there should be a means of the better supporting individual- and team-based learning. This will allow learning to have as much value as possible in the future and, therefore, be more sustainable. The findings are also important to be taken into account in managers’ and HR professionals’ education and training.

The findings of this study can offer insights into employees’ well-being emerging from the possibility to learn and be supported in that learning especially in self-organised structures, which so far has been scarcely studied.

Complexity theorists propose that organizations are made up of complex responsive processes in which people create and recreate organizational forms through dynamic micro-level interactions. Social constructionists add that conversations are the means by which these interactions occur. Our analysis illustrates how the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) engaged a wide range of stakeholders in a successful dialogue process to recreate a new system for monitoring nuclear reactors. The success was due, in large part, to the conversational qualities tacitly and explicitly agreed to by those involved in the process which included a spirit of freedom, inclusion, inquiry, spontaneity, and possibility. Using a grounded theory building process, we show how these qualities produced transformative change by increasing levels of interconnectivity, shared identity, and collective capacity among participants. These findings provide the beginnings of a model for understanding continuous and transformative change and demonstrate the value of engaging the “whole system” in sustained dialogue, even in complex, highly regulated environments.

The purpose of this paper is to compare qualitatively two methods for coordinating traffic lights: a static optimization “green wave” method and an adaptive self‐organizing method.

Statistical results were obtained from implementing a recently proposed model of city traffic based on elementary cellular automata in a computer simulation.

The self‐organizing method delivers considerable improvements over the green‐wave method. Seven dynamical regimes and six phase transitions are identified and analyzed for the self‐organizing method.

The paper shows that traffic light coordination can be improved in cities by using self‐organizing methods.

This improvement can have a noticeable effect on the quality of life of citizens.

Understanding how self‐organization obtains adaptive solutions for complex problems can contribute to building more efficient systems.

Within a gated community, management of common property presents great challenges. Therefore, the diagnostic social ecological system (SES) framework proposed by Elinor Ostrom providing a holistic understanding of complex collective action problems in terms of management of commons is used to investigate key institutional-social-ecological factors influencing collective action in the context of gated communities.

In this paper, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) was used to systematically screen and review the relevant literature from 2000 to 2022, where 28 papers were selected for further analysis.

The study systematically identifies and categorises a series of variables related to self-organizing management in the gated community, and consequently a SES-based gated community management framework is developed. Based on the conceptual framework, the paper discusses logical interrelationships of institutional-social-ecological factors and their impacts on collective action performance of gated communities.

Apart from requiring empirical validation, the conceptual SES-based gated community management framework is certainly subject to continuous improvement in terms of refinement and addition of other potential determinants of gated community collective action.

Not only the review paper provides updates on the latest gated-community collective action research, it also contributes theoretically by conceptualizing the SES framework and its institutional–social–ecological design principles in gated community management. Studying these factors should also be of practical significance because the findings ultimately offer policy insights and management strategies that help policy-makers, property developers and local communities to govern such neighbourhood common resources efficiently and sustainably.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the conditions that give rise to and support self‐organizing learning and creativity in blended learning environments. Particular attention is given to theoretical and practical suggestions and the roles of on‐ and offline working environments.

Iterative grounded theory methodology is used to provide a case analysis of a course held at the University of Helsinki in 2010 in conjunction with theoretical discussions.

Practical advice is provided for organizers of blended learning courses and a theoretical model for self‐organizing in blended learning settings is proposed. Three key considerations of self‐organizing – space, knowledge, and agency –were located and each of them is discussed with a focus on practical recommendations.

More research is needed, especially in a “classroom” context, in order to further clarify the links of different on‐ and offline learning environments and to reach a better understanding of the interplay between them.

The approach presented here can be useful for implementing web‐based blended learning methods in universities and other educational organizations.

Technology‐ and teacher‐oriented views of learning are not successful in the context of blended learning. Conditions for self‐organizing and creativity are needed.

This paper explores economic moralities in self-organised alternative economies and argues that the diverse economies approach is particularly useful in elaborating the self-understandings of such economic communities. The analysis focuses on two types of alternative economies in Finland: ridesharing and timebanking.

Through qualitative data, the paper looks into moments of negotiation where economic moralities of self-organised alternative economies are explicitly debated. The main research data consists of social media conversations, supplemented by a member survey for the participants of the studied timebank. The data are analysed through theory-guided qualitative content analysis.

The analysis shows that the moments of negotiation within alternative economies should not be understood as simple collisions of mutually exclusive ideas, but rather as complex processes of balancing between overlapping and partly incommensurable economic moralities. While self-organised alternative economies might appear as functionally uniform at the level of their everyday operations, they still provide considerable leeway for different conceptions of the underlying normative commitments.

To date, there is little qualitative research on how the participants of self-organised alternative economies reflect the purpose and ethics of these practices. This study contributes to the body of diverse economies research by analysing novel case studies in the Finnish context. Through empirical analysis, this paper also provides a theoretical framework of how the different economic moralities in self-organised alternative economies can be mapped.