Hello everyone thank you so much for coming to this talk. The Talk's title is:
organizational distance also matters: how organizational
distance among Industrial Research teams affects their research productivity.
This is a paper representing a joint collaboration between IBM Research and Cornell University.
We have this observation that within an organization, a project team may not be
the same as the organizational team. Let's take a look at this illustration: to the left, this is a
typical organizational hierarchy, where you have two organizational teams here manager A and the
manager E each managing three employees reporting to them. So these are two organizational teams;
To the right ,you can see there are 2 project teams. This study is in a research and development
organization, so these are two research project teams. Within each of the research project teams,
there are a fixed number of people involved --- team members; and despite that they may
come from different backgrounds, some of them are managers or engineers or researchers, and they
work together for a fixed amount of time to deliver one particular project deliverable.
There are different ways to calculate the organizational distance. To the left if we
only calculate the hierarchical distance, that means that from B to A there's a link;
From C to A, there's a link. You can always calculate the distance between any employees
using such calculation. But if you want to calculate someone who is at the same level, then
you have to go through the direct report. which means, between B and C, in the left chart, their
distance will be calculated as two. But if we also take into account the peer relationship, then as
represented in the right chart, between B and C their distance will be 1. Between B and D their
distance will also be one. We call it a strict hierarchy but with peers relationship (SHP).
Now let's come back to our primary research question. The research question is:
is there a relationship between team dispersion and team productivity? In particular, in this
paper, we're looking at the dispersions from the following four categories: geographical distance,
temporal distance, functional distance which is whether the employee is engineer or researcher,
and the last one --- the focus of this paper ---organizational distance,
as already defined in the previous slides.
There are a series of research works in this domain from the classic Olson and Olson's distance
matters, to the more recent works published by Mark Whitening and other peers. So people
are still interested in what are team composition and how they can influence the team productivity?
At this particular study site, there was a unique opportunity for us. In November 2017,
uh there's a re-org happened in this R&D division. In total, more than 500 employees are involved in
this re-org. They still remain in their existing organizational team, but they can form new
research teams using a self-organized manner. So in total there are 117 research teams being formed
and self-organized. On average there are about seven members in each of those teams. Because
we have access to these 117 teams composition, we also have each of these employees organizational
position in the organization hierarchy chart, so that we can calculate the following four measures
geo-distance temporal distance functional distance and organizational distance.
In addition to these four primary factors, we are also interested in controlling the following
three factors: team size , team motivation , and the same org team, using binary measurements.
Here are some highlights of the findings: First, if we divide all the project teams
into two categories: one category we call them more-productive teams, that means within
a fixed amount of time, they actually delivered a research paper out of the research projects.
The other project teams are the ones that they couldn't develop a research paper. One thing to
worth mentioning, is that at the beginning of this re-org, delivering a paper is one of the
common goals that all these 117 teams share, which makes this a quasi-experiment setting. And that's
why this is a unique opportunity it's rarely seen in many other real-world organization settings.
From this table as you can see that, certainly whether the team explicitly indicates that they
have a confidence to publish a paper by the end of the project, as an indicator of team motivation,
plays an important role in predicting whether they can eventually have that paper outcome.
Also, the functional dispersion score and the organizational distance score is
showing difference in these two clusters of teams.
As a final part of my presentation, I want to present this logistical regression model that
shows how the organization distance score and the team motivation can actually influence the
teams paper publication likelihood. As you can see from this beta coefficient,
the further away these team members are in the organization, can actually lead to a higher chance
of publishing a paper. If they have a stronger team motivation at the beginning, it can also
lead to a higher chance of they have a publication coming out. We see this as an interesting finding,
as you know, distance often is portrayed as a blocker to team's productivity, but here
is certainly empowering the teams, if they have people from different parts of the organization.
More findings and discussions you can refer to our paper.
Thank you