Third party funded individual grant
Acronym: DIGICOP
Start date : 01.01.2022
End date : 31.12.2024
Collaboration platforms are designed to efficiently match resource seekers and contributors that may not have connected otherwise. Yet, for such internal platforms to be successful, resource-seekers must be willing to ask (or actively search) and contributors must be willing to share their knowledge, information or help. Although technology-enabled collaboration of organizational members has been studied widely in several fields, extensive sharing of information and vivid digital collaboration still appears to be the exception rather than the rule. There are a number of reasons. Firstly, to date, different perspectives on the topic have only rarely been combined. While existing approaches in management and psychology research mostly explain differences in technology usage by referring to (individual) human aspects, information systems research, by contrast, focuses primarily on the technical side, e.g. by exploring system alterations and their effects on technology adoption and acceptance. Yet, to fully understand (the lack of) technology-enabled collaboration of individual members of an organization we propose a holistic view on the topic to reconcile the human and the system side and their mutual dependencies. To explore and ultimately stimulate member engagement in digital collaboration contexts, conceptualizing collaboration platforms not only as passive artefacts but also as proactive, interacting entities that can nudge individuals’ behavior, proactively communicate with users and thus initiate interactions is a (risky, yet) promising approach to advance developments in the field.
Secondly, reviewing existing work on the topic of digital collaboration and knowledge exchange in organizations, it is striking that most prior work relies on data derived from (single) case studies.The little cross-case study research in the field does not solve the problem of context-specificity. Although case study research allows for more detailed information to be collected than other designs, findings generally remain rather descriptive in nature and are highly context-specific. Especially the latter makes generalization difficult and limits the identification of generally applicable levers to increase digital information exchange between organizational members of a broader kind. Further, drawing on data of de-facto installed information systems in organizations, (information systems) research inevitably applies a retrospective technological view on the topic, which makes it difficult to test for alternative system specifications to foster human-computer interaction and stimulate effective digital information exchange.
We contribute to the topic of “human-machine interaction” by exploring how individuals and (platform) systems interact and communicate with each other. The project’s overarching research question thus is: “How can organizations foster collaboration on digital platforms?”We conceptualize collaboration as the exchange of knowledge, information or advice between a) members of an organization (human-human interaction) and b) members of an organization and the respective digital platform (human-machine interaction). Ideally, collaboration platforms should not only provide the technical basis for organizational members to interact based on their selective needs, but also initiate and stimulate interaction on an ongoing basis.