Workplace, Teams, & Culture

Internal knowledge markets can facilitate information sharing within large organizations.

Once managers grasp the patterns of employee interactions, they can reduce network inefficiencies.

It's not easy to build a strong culture worldwide. "Cultural hubs" beyond headquarters can help.

Leading innovators are using information systems to make their activities more efficient.

A general assumption about innovation-oriented partnerships between companies is that success grows out of good relationships based on mutual trust, while poor cooperation and a lack of trust lead to disaster. Yet examples abound of high-trust partnerships that fail to innovate and of turbulent ones that succeed. Is trust in fact overrated? Is it sometimes an actual hindrance to innovation? Can we think in terms of an optimal level of trust -- not too little and not too much? Because case studies are not adequate for evaluating correlations between the level of trust and innovativeness -- it is impossible to disentangle trust from the many other contributing factors -- we set up a series of experiments, using pairs of individuals who already knew each other and who had sufficient prior experience together so as to have formed distinct trust perceptions. Results point to a major finding: As mutual trust increases, the partnership's creativity goes up, reaches a maximum point and then starts to decline. Similarly for innovativeness. As mutual trust increases, innovativeness also goes up -- but only to a certain point, after which innovativeness declines, even though it stays at higher levels because of greater commitment. We explain this seemingly strange pattern as follows: If a team enjoys a high level of trust and mutual caring, individuals might become too accommodating, quickly accepting their partners' ideas and thus reducing the amount of dynamic task-oriented conflict. The team might then have lower creative tension, consequently reducing the partnership's effectiveness. The bottom line: When inventing together, trust is good; but avoiding too much trust is better.

An interview with Thomas W. Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, by editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins. These new technologies are not just fancy technologies that let individual people do different things better or faster. These new technologies change the essence of organizations. An organization itself is really primarily a huge human-based machine for communicating information and making decisions. And these new technologies are all about communicating information and helping to make decisions. So, to a greater degree than any technologies since, for instance, those that enabled the Industrial Revolution, we’re now in the midst of a transformation in how businesses are organized that is enabled this time not by new kinds of production technology, but by new kinds of coordination technology.

A new book argues that companies need to adapt to a fundamental change in business.

User-generated content platforms, open source software, crowdsourcing and knowledge markets these are all possible only because of the "social web," the interlinked virtual universe that to so many executives seems to offer the irresistible promise of providing something--ideas, work, decisions--for (almost) nothing, if only they could manage it right. Managing it right means understanding that even though the new platforms are all about harnessing crowds and communities, in the end those crowds and communities are nothing but a sum of individuals. And your company's social web efforts will succeed only to the extent that you are able to attract good individuals, motivate them to perform good work, and empower them to get to know and trust one another enough to collaborate toward the end goals of the community. The question is, How do you do that? The answer: by capitalizing on the motivational power of in reputation--that is, by designing and building an online reputation system that triggers and nourishes the kind of web community that will serve your company's needs. Using examples such as Amazon, eBay, Epinions and Yelp, the author describes how design choices of a reputation system can profoundly affect a community's culture, making an otherwise collaborative and cordial community into a competitive and even combative space.

Large, loosely organized groups of people can work together electronically in surprisingly effective ways.

What it means when people who grew up with technology in their hands become the heart of a workforce--and what it means if managers don't understand them.