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Factors affecting collaboration 1

COLLABORATIVE DISTANCE: A FRAMEWORK FOR DISTANCE FACTORS AFFECTING THE PERFORMANCE OF DISTRIBUTED COLLABORATION

Marc Pallot ESoCE-NET and CCE at Nottingham University email: [email protected] Marc Pallot, EsoCE-Net, 18 rue Sthrau, 75013 Paris, France Phone Nbr: +33 1 4585 6445 Maria Antonia Martínez-Carreras Assistant Professor at University of Murcia Facultad de Informática, 30071 Campus de Espinardo, University of Murcia, Murcia, Spain email: [email protected] Phone Number:+ 34 968367861; Fax Number: +34 968364607 Wolfgang Prinz Director at Fraunhofer FIT and Professor for Cooperation Systems at RWTH Aachen email: [email protected] Fraunhofer FIT, Schloss Birlinghoven, 53754 St. Augustin, Germany Phone: +49-2241-142730; Fax: +49-2241-142084

Factors affecting collaboration 2 ABSTRACT This paper introduces the topic of “Collaborative Distance” within Distributed Collaboration as being an introduction to this Special Issue on Collaborative Working Environments1 (CWE). It starts in discussing various related concepts, identified during an extensive literature review, on both proximity and distance in distributed collaboration. Then, a Collaborative Distance Framework (CDF) is proposed in deriving its four dimensions and related factors from the existing body of knowledge. The section afterwards discusses the interest of such a CDF and introduces the articles published in this special issue. The concluding section discusses the articles’ contributions, limitations and future work as well as recommendations for future research in this area.

1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_Working_Environment

Factors affecting collaboration 3 INTRODUCTION Nowadays, working patterns are becoming extremely complex due to the wide range of collaborative activities and large number of involved stakeholders, most of them having a specific discipline and expertise, and also due to the virtualization of the workplace (Pallot, 2005). As business is becoming more global and broadband connections are increasingly becoming available, there are more and more individuals embracing flexible working and benefiting from its multiple advantages (Puybaraud, 2005). A study on the future of work, carried out by Morello and Burton, highlights a clear trend towards a decrease in working alone and team working within the same time and same place configurations while team working within different place and different time as well as same time and different place configurations are increasing (Morello & Burton, 2006). Lu and colleagues are also recognizing that both globalization effect and availability of advanced information technologies are fostering the trend of globally organized work, which in turn is promoting geographically dispersed teams, as being the main configuration style, within many organizations (Lu et al, 2005). They argue that geographical distance induces differences in time, language, culture, and organizational processes which are negatively impacting team coherence and work practices. They mention virtual work crossing space, time, organization, culture and media as characterized by the notion of discontinuity (Watson-Manheim et al, 2002). When considering collaborative activities, it appears that distance between collaborating individuals is the most important aspect to be considered as it could either facilitate, in case of nearness or proximity, or impede, in case of farness, communication and social interaction. This is also confirmed by proxemics, the social use of space (Hall, 1966), when individuals are

Factors affecting collaboration 4 operating more than 30 meters away then they are not likely to collaborate so often (Kiesler & Cummings, 2002; Kraut et al, 2002; Bradner & Mark, 2002; Armstrong & Cole, 2002; Olson & Olson, 2001; Moon, 1999; Lipnack & Stamps, 1997; Allen, 1977; Latané et al, 1995). In the meantime, others were claiming that technologies are compressing geographical distance (Child et Al, 2000) which means that the perception of distance becomes more subjective as long as people stay connected. A decade ago, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution was announced as well as the death of distance (Cairncross, 1997) while others were claiming later on that distance still matters in international business (Ghemawat, 2001; Goodall & Roberts, 2003). Even, the persistence of distance was openly questioned as firms go abroad while technology makes it possible to do business at a distance (Nachum & Zaheer, 2005). Nonetheless, there are number of issues still requiring additional attention for being able to overcome all distance factors. International collaboration projects bring in positive effects such as higher level of creativity and innovation due to more diversity as well as reduced costs and lead-time in optimizing solutions based on partners’ specific knowledge and core competencies (Pallot & Sandoval, 1998). In contrast, it is argued that increasing the number of partners systematically leads to an exponential increase of management and integration overhead, which is impeding the global collaboration performance (Pallot & Hof, 1999). This effect is mentioned as being the collaboration paradox. Trade-off and decisions are often delayed because several partners are involved in the same business process while their infrastructures are neither compatible, nor interoperable. Furthermore, critical factors such as security, confidentiality, trust and confidence are leading to the “black-box” effect in operating solely in the group (Jones et al., 1999).

Factors affecting collaboration 5 Cummings and Kiesler demonstrated, during a study on multidisciplinary collaborations, that geographically distributed collaboration has a negative impact on both effectiveness and efficiency due to faced difficulties in communication and coordination (Cummings & Kiesler, 2003). What do we know about distance factors that are affecting distributed collaboration performance? It is most probably the right question to ask in order to understand the implications for technologies (Kraut et al, 2002) before to start exploring new ICT artifacts that could help to reach a higher performance during online collaboration. Unfortunately, the current research body lacks a holistic view and framework for capturing all the dimensions of distributed collaboration and its related distance factors to serve as a kind of universal Collaborative Distance Framework (CDF). This framework would prove to be useful for negating conceptual ambiguity, helping to disentangle relationships among distance factors, consolidating results of empirical studies for further researching in this area, and for better understanding the implication of distance factors. In fact, new ICT artifacts might be either creating more distance or at the opposite helping in bridging or compressing distance factors, hence having a positive impact on distributed collaboration performance. In this paper, a holistic view on distance factors and a CDF based on structural, social, technical and legal dimensions are introduced and discussed. The next section defines collaborative distance and provides the background literature relevant with this holistic view and the CDF. The following section derives the four dimensions of the CDF from the existing research literature. The section afterwards discusses and introduces the articles published in this special issue. The

Factors affecting collaboration 6 concluding section discusses the paper’s contributions, limitations and future work as well as recommendations for future research in this area. CONCEPTS DISCUSSION Distributed Group versus Virtual Team One may argue that “distributed group” and “virtual team” concepts are quite identical. Virtual Team is defined by Lipnack & Stamps as a group of people interacting through interdependent tasks guided by common purpose. They are arguing that virtual teams are operating across space, time and organizational boundaries, exactly like distributed teams and unlike collocated teams, through the use of links augmented by webs of communication technologies (Lipnack & Stamps, 1997). Collaboration versus eCollaboration “Collaboration” is defined by Noble and Letsky as being the mental aspects of joint problem solving for the purpose of achieving a shared understanding, making a decision, or creating a product (Noble & Letsky, 2003). Hurley & Hult describe collaboration as being the degree to which team members actively help one another in their work (Hurley & Hult, 1998). Within Wikipedia, collaboration2 is defined as a recursive and creative process where two or more people work together, through collective activities such as sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus, toward the achievement of a common goal. In his book “Shared Minds”, Schrage defines collaboration as a process of shared creation where two or more individuals with complementary skills are interacting to create a shared understanding that none had previously possessed (Schrage, 1990). 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaboration

Factors affecting collaboration 7 A proposed synthesis would be that collaboration is a social interactions based process where stakeholders share knowledge and progressively build-up a mutual understanding that is enabling the creation of new knowledge. “Electronic collaboration” or “eCollaboration” is described by Kock & D’Arcy as being collaboration amongst several individuals whose goal is to accomplish a task together using electronic technologies (Kock & D’Arcy, 2002). It should be noticed that eCollaboration is not limited to Computer Mediated Communication (CMC3) or Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW4) as mentioned in the article entitled “Expanding the Boundaries of ECollaboration” (Kock & Nosek, 2005). In this paper we are addressing “online collaboration” among professionals whatever is their respective organization type, wherever they are located and whatever are the electronic devices and networks they are using. This type of professional, named “eProfessional5”, extensively uses electronic means (i.e. fix and mobile phone, web devices, Wifi) to support his collaborative activities. For sure, one might be rightly thinking that online collaboration is equivalent to eCollaboration in case online collaboration is not restricted to Web devices connected via the Internet. Fortunately, the term “online” has got a standardized definition6 since 1996 which encompass telecommunication and computer technology. Though, one might be anticipating the soon coming-up convergence between telecommunication, media, computing and Web technologies which means that everything will be connected to the Internet and that online collaboration will be addressing collaboration among agents whatever type they are, human beings or not (i.e. robots, things). 3

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mediated_communication http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CSCW 5 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-professional 4

Factors affecting collaboration 8 Finally, “Mass Collaboration” (Kriplean et Al, 2007; Richardson, 2003) or “Massively distributed collaboration” appeared with the extensive use of wiki where content is created by thousands of individuals in a distributed way which represents a radical new modality of content creation (Kapor, 2005). Collaboration Styles Collaboration involves group of participants, either teams which appear very often in the literature as being small groups or at the opposite communities which are referred as being large or very large groups. In the first case, it looks like a structured collaboration with planned outcomes while in the second one, it resembles to unstructured collaboration with unplanned outcomes. One needs to be very careful about the fact that distance factors might not have the same impact depending on the nature of the observed collaboration style. It could range from the very famous symbiotic collaboration style (Birnholtz, 2005; Dana et al, 2001) to the more surprising stigmergic7 collaboration style (Elliott, 2006) (i.e. Wikipedia, Open Source Software, Second Life) and opportunistic collaboration (Chatzkel, 2003; Zhang et al, 2006) to end-up with the improbable webergic collaboration style (Pallot, 2007). The first one embeds a strategy in which participants bring their own specificities to obtain individuals’ benefits. The second one has a strategy to serve the community benefit (i.e. ant colony, online community) while the third one, according to Jianwei Zhang, has an adaptive strategy where group form, break-up and recombine for the benefit of an emerging process leading to a higher level of collective responsibility within more pervasive and flexible distributed collaborations (Zhang et al, 2006). Finally, the fourth one is Mother Nature strategy of open and self-organized sustainable systems 6

Telecommunications: Glossary of Telecommunication Terms, Federal Standard 1037C

Factors affecting collaboration 9 displaying emergent properties or behaviors which is resulting into unplanned outcomes that noone can really predict (i.e. Life evolution, the Internet and the Web, Virtual Worlds). Stigmergic, opportunistic and webergic collaboration styles are related to

“mass collaboration8” or

“Massively Distributed Collaboration9” and to the promise of Reed’s law “Networks that support the construction of communicating groups create value that scales exponentially with network size” also named “Group Forming Networks” (Reed, 1999). Effectiveness, Efficiency and Efficacy As mentioned in Wikipedia10, a simple way to characterize the main difference between effectiveness, efficacy, and efficiency is to consider that “Efficiency is about doing things "right", efficacy is about getting things done, while effectiveness is about doing "right" things”. Individual Productivity versus Interpersonal Productivity Looking at the literature, one may conclude that very few has been done in the area of interpersonal productivity, most probably because individual productivity is paradoxically still considered as the holly grail by business organizations even if, sometime ago, social interaction was already demonstrated as being the source of knowledge creation (Nonaka, 1994). However, a number of research studies on factors affecting group, team and collective efficacy (Parker, 1994; Staples et Al, 1999; Gibson, 1999, 2000; Zellars et Al, 2001; Baker, 2001; Pescosolido, 2001; Gully et Al, 2002; Jung & Sosik, 2003; Whiteoak et Al, 2004; Carroll et Al, 2005; KatzNavon & Erez, 2005; Fuller et Al, 2006; Hardin et Al, 2006, 2007) or effectiveness (Prussia & Kinicki, 1996; Furst et Al, 1999; Bal & Foster, 2000; Broom, 2002; Kayworth & Leidner, 2002; 7

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_collaboration 9 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_distributed_collaboration 8

Factors affecting collaboration 10 Noble & Letsky, 2003; Gonzalez et Al, 2003; Piccoli et Al, 2004) have been carried out. Noble and Letsky proposed an interesting four individual and team categories of collaboration metrics, namely understandings, information interactions, task performance and products based on a combination of both Cognition-Behavior-Product and Transactive Memory model. These models are featuring both individual and team cognitive, behavior and products. They also provided the corresponding metrics for each category from product up to understandings and claimed that not only the cognitive-focused collaboration metrics measure team effectiveness but also provide insight into the reasons for effectiveness. Proximity versus Distance There are numbers of research studies on distance or proximity factors affecting collaboration performance within geographically distributed groups as mentioned in previous literature reviews (Knoben and Oerlemans, 2006; Hyypiä and Kautonen 2005; Cummings & Kiesler, 2003; Bradner & Mark, 2002; Kiesler & Cummings, 2002; Kraut et Al, 2002, Nova, 2003; Olson & Olson, 2001; Torre and Gilly, 2000). In those literature reviews, proximity or nearness represents collocated collaboration while distance represents distributed collaboration. Kiesler and Cummings, in a previous empirical study, demonstrated the positive role of proximity on relationships and group interaction, hence on collaboration performance. Torre and Gilly claimed that nearness or proximity provides a high level of information richness during interaction and therefore facilitates the sharing of both explicit and tacit knowledge. Knoben and Oerlemans came to the conclusion that greater is the distance among group members and harder is tacit knowledge transfer. It is claimed by Nova that conversation is far easier when individuals 10

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effectiveness

Factors affecting collaboration 11 are in a physical setting than in mediated communication. It is also demonstrated by Kock’s Media-Naturalness theory which is arguing that a decrease in the degree of communication naturalness (face-to-face communication being the reference) leads to decrease the interaction quality due to increased cognitive effort and communication ambiguity as well as decreased physiological arousal (Kock, 2005) . It is also claimed that nearness or proximity increases frequency of communication, likelihood of chance encounter, facilitates transitions from encounters to communication, fosters informal conversations and helps maintaining task and group awareness (Nova, 2003) which Eriksson named social translucence (Eriksson et al, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008). Howells argued that spatial proximity and tacit knowledge are also often necessary for interpreting explicit knowledge (Howells 2002). Due to the antonymic relationship between distance and proximity concepts, one might be deducting that distance has necessarily a negative impact on group interaction, hence on collaboration performance. This is confirmed by Bradner and Mark in another study concluding that CSCW should develop technologies for bridging social distance, and not only geographic distance (Bradner & Mark, 2002). Distributed collaboration has its own specific advantages, such as creating emotional distance during negotiation activities, which should not necessarily be removed through technologies mimicking face-to-face situations (Schunn et Al, 2002). However, others have used proximity technology artifacts as a mean to compress distance factors, such as social proxy tools providing a certain level of social translucence. Due to the impressive number of studies on distributed collaboration published within different scientific fields and its domain complexity, it is not obvious to figure out all proximity or distance factors and their inter-relationships. Hence, to foresee an emerging holistic view and framework

Factors affecting collaboration 12 allowing a sound classification of all published studies and results in this area. Beside the frequently studied geographical or spatial distance, there are many other types of distance affecting collaboration. Most, if not all, collaboration barriers are generating various distance types such as organizational, institutional and cultural obstacles, just to mention a few. FACTORS AFFECTING COLLABORATION Knoben and Oerlemans, in a previous literature review on proximity and interorganizational collaboration, have clearly illustrated the overlap and ambiguity of proximity concepts used in the literature (Knoben and Oerlemans, 2006). They have selected 80 papers collected within 3 different areas where proximity is studied, namely: innovation and organization; proximity and regional economic development; and proximity, network(s) and inter-firm collaboration. They have condensed various labels of proximity dimensions found during the literature review into 7 dimensions, namely: geographical, organizational, cultural, technological, cognitive, institutional, and social. Finally, they proposed to group those 7 proximity dimensions into only 3 dimensions in order to negate a large part of the conceptual ambiguity hence making studies’ findings more comparable and allowing more cumulative knowledge development. They also recognized that proximity dimensions can interact over time on each other in strengthening or weakening their respective effect as they are heavily correlated. They were also regretting the lacking published longitudinal research including several dimensions instead of looking at a single one in isolation. Instead of focusing on a specific research area like inter-organizational collaboration, we are introducing a lacking holistic view and framework clustering various distance dimensions and related factors appearing in the course of distributed or distant collaboration. We selected all

Factors affecting collaboration 13 relevant research areas such as Community of Practice (CoP), Computer Support for Cooperative Work (CSCW), Distributed Knowledge Management (DKM), Geographic Dispersion in Teams (GDT), Front-End Innovation (FEI), Inter-Organizational Collaboration (IOC), Knowledge Management (KM), and New Product Development (NPD) which resulted into a larger set of published studies on distance or proximity factors whatever is the studied field. We have named the framework “Collaborative Distance” instead of “Collaborative Proximity” because we are looking at the effect of distance factors that are generated during distributed collaboration. These distance factors then need to be overcome in creating proximity. Examples of creating proximity within distributed groups are to use temporary collocation for creating geographical proximity; enforce identical project management structures for creating organizational proximity; involve project participants into social activities for creating relational proximity; apply the same collaboration tools or standards to enable interoperability among tools and applications for creating technical proximity. All these above examples of creating proximity, hence bridging various types of distance, are not necessarily built from the use of ICT. Using a Webconferencing tool for creating virtual proximity through online collocation is an example of the use of ICT to compress geographical distance while providing a touch of face-to-face interaction. A holistic view of distance factors and framework would be useful for the scientific community to easily identify and do some useful comparison with previous relevant studies (i.e. benchmarking) once they are properly categorized and to consolidate the resulting knowledge. We define the concept of “Collaborative Distance” as being a research area which consists in making observation on distance factors affecting collaboration performance within distributed groups from which is derived a universal framework (CDF). We are not using the concept of

Factors affecting collaboration 14 collaboration distance as it was previously defined as being the distance between two collaborating individuals that are nodes in a collaboration graph (Odda, 1979; Harary, 1979) also known as being the Erdos number (Batagelj & Mrvar, 2000), distance in between two mathematicians collaborating with Erdos, or Bacon number for two actors collaborating with Bacon. Another example of collaboration distance among individuals experimented during the ECOSPACE project (Prinz et Al, 2006), is to consider all events (i.e. create, read, edit) generated by group members on all content objects uploaded within a shared workspace. The resulting figure is a hyperGraph constituted of individuals, content objects and relationships that are valued to measure the collaboration distance among group members (Pallot et Al, 2006). Distance is mentioned in the literature as having strong general effects and significant implications on both collaborative work and supporting technologies (Kiesler & Cummings 2002; Olson & Olson 2001). In this context, distance or proximity (Kiesler and Cummings 2001; Knoben and Oerlemans 2006; Oerlemans & al 2000; O’Leary & Cummings 2002; Torre & Rallet 2005; Watson-Manheim et Al 2002) appears in the literature either as the main factor (in this Literature context, “distance” means implicitly “geographical distance”) or as a composite concept grouping factors affecting collaboration performance among organizations or individuals. Distance may also appear as geographically distant collaboration often described as distributed teams or groups (Kiesler & Cummings, 2002; Torre & Rallet 2005) or as physically distant (Watson-Manheim et Al 2002) or even as distant linkages (Oerlemans and al 2000). However, in this case distant collaboration simply means that collaborating individuals are operating from geographically dispersed sites. Distance is a quite complex concept composed of several dimensions corresponding to diverse “aspects” or “perspectives” such as geographical,

Factors affecting collaboration 15 organizational and technological dimensions (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006) or geographical, industrial, organizational, temporal, cultural, cognitive, social and institutional dimensions (Hyypiä & Kautonen 2005). To be noticed that having 3 or 8 dimensions, as expressed in the above two examples, may appear quite incredible but in fact it depends on including distance classes or types in the model. Knoben and Oerlemans have identified six non spatial dimensions, one spatial dimension and nine synonymous dimensions during their literature review. After interpreting proximity dimensions for the specific field of Inter-Organizational Collaboration (IOC) they proposed that only organizational, technological and geographical dimensions were relevant in order to reduce the existing conceptual ambiguity. Fischer proposed 4 distance dimensions, namely physical, temporal, technological and conceptual while he was considering different cultures as being a source of diversity and not necessarily as being a cultural distance (Fischer, 2005b). Fischer is also considering distance and diversity factors as being opportunities or sources of social creativity rather than being exclusively collaboration barriers (Fischer, 2004). Bonifacio and Molani argued already about the key role or richness of diversity in the process of knowledge creation (Bonifacio & Molani, 2003). A systematic literature review has revealed eighteen different types of distances after removing those which appears as being synonymous (see table 1). All types of distance, affecting collaboration among group members in various ways, listed in the “Collaborative distance” table are mentioned in the literature.

COLLABORATIVE DISTANCE AS A FOUR-DIMENSIONAL FRAMEWORK

Factors affecting collaboration 16 Introduction The idea of developing a framework which provides a holistic view of factors to collect, consolidate and share accumulated knowledge, based on previous empirical studies, was already proposed in the Knowledge Management area (Vaidyanathan, 2006). According to Schunn, Crowley, and Okada, the concern is rather about studying distant or distributed collaboration than studying physical proximity or collocated collaboration. They were considering collaboration from a geographical distance point of view (Schunn et Al, 2002) as the trend is towards collaboration happening within different places and same or different times (Morello & Burton, 2006) which implies the extensive use of online or electronic Collaboration. Hence, such framework is named “Collaborative Distance”. In this paper, we are using two types of factors overcoming distance barriers, as previously defined by Child and al, respectively named “Distance-compressing” factors and “Distance-bridging” factors. They also named the type of factors creating barriers as “Distancecreating” factors (Child et Al, 2000). Though, creating distance in some specific cases (i.e. emotional distance) might be valuable (Damian, 2002). Schunn and al thought this realization brings us to the second important practical implication of the findings for distant collaboration. In order to decide when to bring in supporting technologies and which technologies to use, we need to know more about why distance might help or not collaborative activities. Authors’ research has provided the first clues that it might help, but much further research needs to be conducted on why and under which circumstances it might help.

Factors affecting collaboration 17 It is also necessary to take note that not only collaboration occurs either in collocated situations - physical project workspaces - or in distant situations - virtual or online workspaces but may also occur in mix or hybrid situation - partly distributed - where several individuals are collocated and others are remotely engaged into collaborative activities. This kind of distributedcollocated collaboration is named “Physual Designing” (Kristensen, 2004). Different case studies are illustrating the problems faced by individuals collaborating in a specific domain when there are conceptual ambiguities which are hindering collaboration performance (Koen et Al, 2001; Perttula & Sääskilahti, 2004). It is widely recognized that shared, mutual or common understanding is the main ingredient of collaboration among individuals (Fischer, 2005a). Dimensions of Collaborative Distance Knoben and Oerlemans have proposed geographical, organizational and technological dimensions for reducing the ambiguity of the proximity concept as used in the literature (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006). However, the geographical dimension contents only one factor corresponding to physical distance. The technological dimension has got also only one factor which is related to technology knowledge. There is no mention of the legal dimension while it is playing a major role in enabling or disabling collaboration and even more in the case of distributed collaboration. They have grouped cultural and social factors into the organizational dimension while geographical factors are excluded. Though, one may argue that organizational culture, being one element of cultural distance, affects also collaboration performance. Jeanne Wilson in “Subjective Distance in Teams” (Wilson et Al, 2005) introduced the relativity notion in arguing that there are two categories of distance factors. The first one, named “objective

Factors affecting collaboration 18 distance” concerns spatial, temporal and Configurational elements (O’Leary & Cummings, 2002), where Configurational element captures the pattern or arrangement of team members across various sites, independent of the spatial-temporal distances among them. The second one is the “subjective distance” which mitigates physical distance or dispersion. Subjective distance being driven by a wide variety of factors. Subjectivity in distance is related to the effect perceived by people through different sort of feelings, such as the obvious example of emotional distance. O’Leary and Cummings have mentioned the necessity of developing a dedicated framework and measures for characterizing the spatial, temporal, and configurational aspects of geographic dispersion in teams. Watson-Manheim and al, were arguing that people in virtual work environments encounter numerous boundaries in their work lives that may not be present in more conventional work settings to the same extent (Watson-Manheim et Al, 2005). Others have been examining in some depth five boundaries they observed in five separate research studies of field-based teams: geographical, functional, temporal, organizational, and identity - team membership - (Espinosa et Al, 2003). They determined that these boundaries were especially salient in examinations of virtual work. Orlikowski found boundaries to be particularly important in understanding how work was conducted in a geographically dispersed high tech organization (Orlikowski, 2002). Seven boundaries have been identified that the organization’s members routinely traverse in their daily activities: temporal, geographical, social, cultural, historical, technical, and political. These previous studies reveal that the conceptual ambiguity of proximity/distance and complexity of interlaced factors in the context of collaborative activities, virtual teams or

Factors affecting collaboration 19 Geographic Dispersion in Teams is even wider than previously demonstrated by Knoben and Oerlemans (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006). In this study, the used approach is different in the fact that looking, through a multidisciplinary literature review, at all existing types of distance and proximity previously studied has allowed to group all types of distance into four dimensions. They are representing the logical dimensions of distributed collaboration among eProfessionals. The proposed dimensions of collaborative distance are namely structural, social, technical and legal & ethical (see Figure 1). This holistic research approach about distance factors in distributed collaboration is tentatively named “Collaborative Distance”, inducing a balanced observation of any distributed collaboration case along those four dimensions as a kind of reference framework including a holistic view of factors affecting collaboration performance. Categorized types of distance allow making various measurements that could be then eventually combined into a single overall indicator of collaborative distance. Insert Figure 1 here

Structural Dimension The structural dimension includes 5 different distance types namely Configurational, Institutional, Organizational, Spatial and Temporal. It is recognized that different arrangements, in space and time, are supporting collaboration activities. Several research studies were already addressing the ways distributed teams communicate synchronously and asynchronously (DeSanctis et Al, 2001; Pauleen & Yoong, 2001). Nevertheless, both synchronous and asynchronous interactions are recognized to be important (Olson & Olson, 2001). However, it

Factors affecting collaboration 20 might be very valuable to have some figures about the repartition in between the two modes of interactions. Regarding the mass collaboration style, then it is quite simple as people are only interacting asynchronously. It makes sense to be arguing that collocated team members are rather using the synchronous interaction mode while distributed team members are mainly interacting asynchronously and occasionally, when absolutely necessary or when a broadband connection is available, turning into synchronous interactions supported by ICT (i.e. telephony, webconferencing, online chat, application sharing, whiteboard). It is also recognized that in the case of online collaboration access to information and resources is almost limitless on the Internet, web and through multiple available digital libraries (Murray, 1999). Configurational Distance Configurational distance deals with the distribution of resources, expertise and R&D work (Grinter et Al, 1999) through the arrangement of group members across different localizations (O’Leary & Cunnings, 2002) and the way they are connected to each other through work spaces and physical aspects of work environments (Oldham et Al, 1995). Observed factors are leadership, collaboration incentive, team membership (identity), group cohesion, competition and conflict as well as unbalanced power and expertise in decision making. Institutional Distance Institutional Distance is related to regional contextual developments and country’s specific regulations that are impacting collaboration performance. Observed factors are historical and political particularities as well as economical, educational and technological development, and climatic differences (Child et Al, 2000). It is also considered as learning about and understanding of a foreign environment and its national or regional culture often embedded into its specific

Factors affecting collaboration 21 language (Nordstrom & Vahlne, 1992). It could also be related to regional and national standards such as the metric system. It is believed that globalization effect is pushing an on-going institutional convergence of life styles, consumption patterns, human rights standards, legal frameworks and business practices (Child et Al, 2000). Organizational Distance Organizational Distance represents the degree to which explicit or implicit rules of interaction and routines of behavior that makes coordination more effective are different and not necessarily interoperable (Torre & Rallet, 2005). Traditional encountered factors are management overhead and coordination burden as well as different communication channels, lack of interoperability, belonging and behavioral cohesion. Spatial Distance Spatial Distance is an objective measurable distance among collaboration stakeholders (Wilson et Al, 2005). Physical, Geographical, Local and Territorial distance types are considered as being synonymous (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006). Spatial barrier is impeding collaboration interaction across distance (Fischer, 2005a) and makes collaborative design difficult to support even if ICT enables new forms of collaboration (Olson & Olson 2001). Related factors are a notable difficulty for building trust among collaboration stakeholders, due to the lack of collocation and face-to-face communication, and the increase of cognitive effort due to lower level of media naturalness (Kock, 2005). A temporary collocation of all stakeholders on a same location for a kick-off and later project meetings facilitates relationships creation and trust building through the use of social activities. Temporal Distance

Factors affecting collaboration 22 Temporal distance is also measurable and mainly due to time distortion in the working environment generated by collaboration across several time zones or across several working shifts or through redesign and evolution by people not necessarily involved at the earlier stage of a design process (Finholt, Sproull, & Kiesler, 2001; Fischer, 2004). A special case of collaboration with the original designers is “reflexive Computer Supported Cooperative Work” , which supports the same individual user who can be considered as two different persons at points of time that are far apart (Thimbleby et Al, 1990). Long term collaboration requires that present day designers are aware of the rationale (Moran & Caroll, 1996) behind decisions that shaped the artifact and aware of information about possible alternative that were considered but not implemented. Social Dimension The Social dimension is also composed of 5 different distance types or classes, namely Relational, Cultural, Emotional, Lingual and Cognitive. Though, in case the cognitive distance does not include the absorptive capacity factor then it would be necessary to add a Learning distance type. All these distance types are related to social interaction factors that are facilitating or impeding knowledge sharing, mutual understanding and knowledge creation. It is widely recognized that collocated situations are facilitating social activities among team members, help everyone to better know one another and therefore facilitate the building-up of trust as well as common ground, hence mutual understanding. Another very important aspect is the ability for every group member to foresee what others are doing in order to be able to contribute where it is the most appropriate, named social and team awareness (Prinz, 1999; Schäfer et Al, 2004) or social translucence (Erickson, 2000). The use of virtual worlds to better support social

Factors affecting collaboration 23 translucence was already explored within a previous experimentation (Prinz et Al, 2004). However, it might be worthwhile to compare group awareness or social translucence with “social intelligence” (Goleman, 2006) which is combining social awareness - what we sense - and social facility - what we do – in order to clarify the conceptual approach of group awareness. Relational Distance Relational distance simply deals with the way people build-up relationships with one another. Different authors sometimes use various labels for identical concepts such as relational distance. For example, as mentioned by Knoben and Oerlemans as another source of ambiguity (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006), the concept named “personal proximity” (Schamp, Rentmeister & Lo, 2004) and the one named “relational proximity” (Coenen, Moodysson & Asheim, 2004) are quite identical to the one named either “social distance” or “social proximity” (Boschma 2005).Obviously, building-up relationships with one another leads to the notion of social networking and the self-organizing aspect of communities often named community of practice or community of knowledge (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Brown & Duguid, 1991; 2000; Brown, Duguid & Haviland, 1994; Wenger, 1998) where members are sharing practical experiences within informal settings (Wenger, 1998). Observed induced factors are cohesion and trust level as well as motivation to share knowledge. To be noticed that heterogeneous weak ties are more appropriate when there is a greater cognitive distance that could lead to important stimuli for innovation (Nooteboom, 2000; Grabher, 2004). Luft and Ingham were arguing that larger is the interaction arena (space of mutual understanding) and more productive will be the interpersonal relationship (Luft & Ingham, 1955). Cultural Distance

Factors affecting collaboration 24 Cultural distance represents the understanding and behavioral differences among people living and working in various regions of the world and organizations. They do not communicate information, interpret it and react in the same way (Zheng Ma, Pawar & Riedel, 2006). For example, a lack of interaction habit could lead to a non-collaborative behavior (Biggs, 1996). Previous studies brought different elements in the discussion about the effect of cultural distance in the context of international diversification (Morosini et Al, 1998; Shenkar, 2001; West & Graham, 2004; Tihanyi et Al, 2005). Theoretical and empirical evidence were previously used to explain diverging findings in order to help resolving the national cultural distance paradox (Brouthers & Brouthers, 2001). Observed factors are difficulties in reaching a mutual understanding, in agreeing on organizational structures, in decision processes or communication procedures (Shane, 1994; Alexander, 2000; Pawar, Menon & Riedel, 1994). However, cultural differences contribute largely to the diversity richness which supports a higher level of creativity (Nooteboom, 2000; Bonifacio & Molani, 2003; Fischer, 2005b). Therefore, there is an interesting paradox in between homogeneous group where it is easier to reach a mutual understanding but has less creativity stimuli and heterogeneous group where it is longer to reach a mutual understanding but has more creativity stimuli. Emotional Distance Emotional distance represents the way an individual or a group can perceive one another feelings or emotional state or socio-emotional exchange which could be disturbing, slowing-down or even impeding a specific collaboration process such as arguments confrontation or requirements negotiation. A case study about distant negotiation has revealed that requirements negotiation meetings within computer-mediated distributed settings did not result in a decrease of

Factors affecting collaboration 25 performance while the ability to better sense emotional states within face-to-face meetings brings the risk of impeding the negotiation process (Damian, 2002). A recent field study on the use of shared workspace and group blogging has revealed that emotional and social distances are providing a chance to remotely start a relationship with someone who is too shy or emotional for interacting lively (Pallot et Al, 2008). Lingual distance Lingual distance determines the level of difficulty for a heterogeneous group of people to share meanings and understanding while at the same time it brings in diversity as languages are very much based on history, culture and tradition (Wong & Trinidad, 2004) and therefore play a key role in cultural and cognitive behaviors. A greater lingual distance is very much slowing-down or even blocking interactions among collaboration stakeholders. Encountered factors are isolation feeling, discouragement to collaborate and difficulty to establish relationships and mutual understanding while at the same time there could be more creative ideas due to the higher level of diversity. Cognitive Distance Cognitive distance deals with the way everyone or a specific group interprets, understands and evaluates things differently than one another (Nooteboom, 1992; 2000). In this context, Nooteboom who has introduced this concept in the literature, defines cognition as being a broad range of mental activity, including proprioception, perception, sense making, categorization, inference, value judgments, emotions, and feelings, which all build on each other. On the relation between cognitive distance and innovation performance, Nooteboom proposed that there is an inverted-U shaped curve relationship meaning that until learning by interaction can occur then

Factors affecting collaboration 26 cognitive distance has a positive effect on innovation capacity (Nooteboom, 1992, 1999). In case cognitive distance is too large then it is impeding learning by interaction and therefore making mutual understanding either difficult or impossible. It is very close to the famous citation that “innovation resides at the frontier of disciplines”. Absorptive capacity is recognized as an important factor in this context (Nooteboom, 2000). The innovation performance is also strongly related to the novelty effect which originates from making new combinations. They also found that the positive effect for firms is much higher when engaging in more radical, exploratory alliances than in more exploitative alliances. Another interesting aspect is to look at the way communities interact and try to better understand the meaning, the role and the importance of cognitive distance (Cohendet, 2005). Technical Dimension The Technical dimension includes 5 distance types or classes, namely Conceptual, Contextual, Referential, Semantic, and technological. Conceptual Distance Greater is the number of disciplines involved in a distributed collaboration, whatever is induced by other distance factors, and greater is the difficulty to synthesize all perspectives and colliding concepts issued by different specialists (Fischer, 2001). Conceptual barriers, mentioned as being an expertise gap, appear systematically during communication between domain experts and novices while a conceptual gap appear during communication between stakeholders from different disciplines or practices (Fischer, 2004). The last one is foreseen as a conceptual dimension between different domains. Fischer argued that collaboration can be spatially, temporally, technologically and conceptually distributed (Fischer, 2005b).

Factors affecting collaboration 27 In fact, conceptual distance represents the differences among concepts expressed in semantic value of the network connecting those concepts. For example, proximity expresses nearness while distant expresses farness. As farness is the antonym of nearness then one may conclude that distant is also the antonym of proximity. Distance is a concept which value is ranging from nearness (proximity) up to farness (distant). As a conclusion, greater is the proximity and smaller is the distance and vice-versa. Collaborative learning and working require a shared understanding environment in which the meanings of terms or labels, concepts and related objects can be debated and resolved (Resnick, 1991). Contextual Distance Contextual issues affect knowledge application in various situations that are leading to improve problem solving in the workplace. For example, a context menu provides, to the user, a set of specific contextualized actions according to the nature of the selected object. It means that knowing about the context of specific activities allows connecting various pieces of information and creating possible paths for the user. It also provides functionality for updating and extending its content allowing people from the workplace to become content providers. Thus, it is argued that ICT can help bridging contextual distance (Demetriadis et Al, 2005) in designing context awareness (Gross & Prinz, 2003). Context awareness, within computer science, refers to the idea that computers can both sense and react based on their environment. In this area Dey, Salber, and Abowd defines context as “any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, a place, or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application” (Dey et Al, 2001). Referential Distance

Factors affecting collaboration 28 Referential distance corresponds to the distance between the point of origin and the correlating document measured by the number of the minimally necessary references. In this way it is possible to describe the potential relevance of a document compared to the origin of referencing. If the referential distance increases, the relevance can be expected to decrease (Fuchs-Kittowski & Köhler, 2005). Semantic Distance Semantic distance, as well as semantic relatedness11 and semantic similarity (inverse of distance, also known as semantic proximity), represents the level of relationship from one term to one another. It could be expressed by a number ranging from -1 up to 1, or between 0 and 1, where 1 display high relatedness and 0 for none. Ontologies help to define a distance between terms or words in tracking nodes and edges in graph representations. Statistical tools such as vector space model are used to correlate words and textual contexts from a suitable text corpus (cooccurrence). Semantic differential is another way of looking at semantic distance through potential rating scale used to measure the connotative meaning of terms or concepts. Technological Distance Technological distance is the result of the differences between the use of various technologies that could be either ICT or production technologies or even a combination of other technology types (i.e. Biology). Collaboration activities are potentially enhanced as collaborative technologies enable individuals to contribute with their own specificities to the collective work (DeSanctis et Al, 2001). However, distributed group members should have a mutual understanding about the collaborative technologies (Mulder, 2002) and their availability at their 11

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Factors affecting collaboration 29 own location (Mayben et Al, 2003). It is argued that very often individuals do not feel comfortable with using ICT to support distant collaboration (Pauleen & Yoong, 2001). Distributed group members should have a mutual understanding about how to use collaborative technologies (Mulder, 2002), hence it may explain the highly usage rate of both telephone and electronic mailing technologies as almost everyone, nowadays, is able to use them properly. A quite synonymous of Technological distance is Industrial distance as it is often related to organizations using similar or close production technologies (Hyypiä & Kautonen 2005). Technological distance is resulting from the differences between the amount or maturity level of technological knowledge that one can learn from one another, hence the link with the absorptive capacity. A lower technological distance (nearness) among collaboration stakeholders facilitates the acquisition and development of technological knowledge and technologies (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006). Technological distance is linked to the concept of absorptive capacity as being the ability to assimilate and apply external knowledge (Nooteboom, 2000; Cohen & Levinthal, 1990) Legal and Ethical Dimension Legal and ethical aspects should not be neglected as there are demonstrated relationships with social implications, exploitation objectives, security and confidentiality agreements as well as privacy and inclusion concerns which are often leading to conflicting situations among collaboration stakeholders. Social implications are related on the one hand to trust building and mutual confidence among stakeholders. On the other hand, social implications are related to public and management recognition, such as rewarding mechanism and awards, as well as learning, pre-emptive protection, control, and enabling commercial production of the outcome as

Factors affecting collaboration 30 demonstrated in a previous study (Sawhney, 2002). This dimension is often simply ignored within previous empirical studies while it would deserve to receive much more attention as the implications of legal and ethical distance factors could easily turn any collaboration into a very low performance when wrongly addressed. Ownership Distance Ownership distance is related to Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), patenting and copyrighting as well as “open source design” or “creative commons”. Sawhney is arguing that Intellectual property rights (IPR) play an important role in making design innovations accessible to target communities and producers in developing countries (Sawhney, 2002). Property rights in scientific research and academic settings have always caused passionate debate whether it should have a public or commercial nature. Currently, there are two opposite trends. On the one hand, there is a willingness to promote greater commercialization of research through formal IPR mechanisms like patents and copyrights. On the other hand, there is a growing support for greater openness towards academic programs and research through Open Source initiatives (Sawhney, 2002) and for open mass collaboration (i.e. Wiki) through Creative Commons (Pallot et Al, 2006). Ristau Baca is arguing that while the Creative Commons licensing system has achieved major recognition and use, its application to scientific transactions presents major challenges as it involves copyrighted works based on individual licensing creative works for use on the Internet while a Science Commons license implies a transfer of physical goods or information not subject to copyright (Ristau Baca, 2006). According to Ristau Baca, Science Commons, in contrast, involves significantly more complex and sophisticated parties but a

Factors affecting collaboration 31 properly implemented Science Commons license could help bridging ownership distance (Ristau Baca, 2006). Financial Distance Hart and Moore argued that the value of a business relation depends on the participation of the parties to the relation and investments made (Hart & Moore, 1990). Some player’s participation may be indispensable to an asset and in case it does not participate in the venture then the asset may not be productive at all. Financial investment behavior is often related to past collaboration experiences and confidence in the fact that there is no financial investment gap or distance with other partners. Some investments are relation or asset specific meaning that their value outside the relation is very low (Hart and Moore, 1990). Contractual Distance Contractual distance is related to the aspect of specifying participants’ rights and obligations within different conceivable circumstances that may occur during a collaboration project. Many contingencies may not be possible to foresee, or even if that would be the case, it would most likely be prohibitively expensive to draft contracts encompassing all conceivable contingencies as argued by Hart and Moore in a theory of property rights based on incentives (Hart and Moore, 1990). Hence, many contingencies, often related to Intellectual Property Rights, security and confidentiality as well as ethical aspect such as privacy and inclusion (Silverston, 2004), are not properly addressed in contracts and therefore create contractual distance among parties that may impact collaboration performance. The security aspect is not a minor issue as it appears to be one of the necessary conditions enabling trust building among distributed collaboration stakeholders, especially in the context of the Internet and the Web (Appelt et Al, 2007).

Factors affecting collaboration 32 Furthermore, national regulations regarding the use of ICT might differ from one country to one another that are also creating contractual distance regarding the protection of ownership, security and privacy. In case a group of partners do not share certain concerns then virtual mediation is not going to create proximity such as ethical proximity even if ICT appears like compressing spatial distance (Introna, 2005).

ARTICLES IN THIS SPECIAL ISSUE In the article entitled “Socio-technical Influences on Virtual Research Environments”, Ponti discusses about the design of virtual research environments and implications of sociotechnical aspects within inter-organizational research collaboration.

Based on a literature

review, 11 socio-technical aspects were identified which have been grouped into 5 categories previously specified by Olson et Al (2007). In term of implication for the design of Virtual Research Environments, she is, first of all, confirming that distance and time still matter. Secondly, she looks at the inclusion of new comers through careful dialogue with tolerance for ambiguities, emotional exchange and time for building relationships and mutual trust during face-to-face communication. Then, in case collaboration stakeholders are not sufficiently self motivated for collaborating, it is recommended to put in place an incentive system where managers negotiate their discretion and accountability. Finally, conflicting interests among multiple stakeholders are identified as undermining the design of collaborative research environments. Hence, it is proposed to integrate both technological and social issues related to collaboration into an interpretive process involving all stakeholders. As a conclusion, Ponti

Factors affecting collaboration 33 argues that traditionally technological and social aspects are separately treated while they are composed of interrelated aspects impacting each other. In “An integrated collaboration environment for various types of collaborative knowledge”, Fuchs-Kittowski and Siegeris, based on several case studies and 3 scenarios, address the need for an integrated collaboration environment to support different types of collaboration (i.e. team or small group, community or large group, net or mix of the two previous type). They argue that due to the simultaneous involvement of individuals in various collaboration types, hence in various group types, an integrative approach would avoid media and trust discontinuities. Authors review the different classes of group awareness such as informal awareness, social awareness, structural awareness and workspace awareness and come to the conclusion that group-type awareness provides information about values for features. Finally, they present a prototyped implementation of an integrated collaboration environment where each group can select its own collaboration tools subset which is saved into its group profile. It means that all selected tools will be automatically associated with all members, hence with the specific working context. It further implies that group members could not use their most favorite tools in the case they are not necessarily integrated into the collaboration environment. Last but not least, the visualization of awareness information is user customizable (i.e. information type, visualization mode) and saved into the user profile. As a conclusion, authors are arguing that in contrast with the use of several loosely coupled applications, the integrated approach allows to contextualize all selected collaboration tools according to specific group’s needs and each group can evolve, accordingly to fast changing business needs, seamlessly from one group-type to the next one.

Factors affecting collaboration 34 CONCLUSION The impressive number of distance types to bridge, most probably, explains the current plethora of tools used by people for online collaboration. Though, identifying the frontiers between communication tools (i.e. telephony, VoIP, emailing, IM), coordination tools (i.e. shared agenda, workflow) and cooperation tools (BSCW, SharePoint) is already not obvious. It was previously argued that communication (information & data exchange), coordination (task & object synchronization) and cooperation (collective operations into a common workspace) were composing the three layers of either collocated or distributed collaboration (Pallot et Al, 2004). However, some tools like shared workspace (i.e. BSCW, SharePoint) are covering several layers through embedded communication features for workspace members (i.e. event notification), coordination features to synchronize objects (i.e. object upload & download, versioning, history), for some of them, features to synchronize tasks and online collocation of workspace members (i.e. presence) as well as Concertation features (i.e. Group Blogging, polling) and classification (i.e. object tagging). Still, one needs to use other tools such as Web-conferencing and Instant Messaging (IM) for synchronous communication as well as eMailing for asynchronous communication. Furthermore, whatever features are integrated into a Shared Workspace tool, everyone does not necessarily use the same set of features and tools. Hence, the paramount importance of personalization and interoperability within the Technological Distance. We discussed the need for clarification about concepts used for representing factors affecting distributed collaboration and grouping them into valid classes. Furthermore, identifying interrelationships among the different factors and foreseeing their impact on each other makes the CDF even more valuable. The main idea behind the development of this CDF was to reach a

Factors affecting collaboration 35 higher level of understanding on distance factors and their impacts on distributed collaboration performance (effectiveness, efficiency and efficacy). As such, it allowed us to categorize previous published empirical studies on distance factors and to concurrently foresee which existing or emerging concepts and related artifacts were bridging which collaboration distances. As already mentioned in the literature review, individuals entering into collaboration are facing a kind of paradox. On the one hand, close proximity among team members speeds up the way to reach a mutual understanding but on the other hand, it simultaneously reduces the creativity and innovativeness potential due to a lower level of diversity. It has been observed so far that a higher diversity level means spending lot more time to reach a proper level of mutual understanding enabling an effective collaborative innovation. Some years ago, new technologies such as Wiki and Blogging opened the door to mass participation where individuals can freely expose and share on the web their views and concerns that is leading to some sort of collective intelligence and participative democracy. Furthermore, Wiki has enabled mass collaboration where thousands of individuals are creating together valuable content for the society at large (i.e. Wikipedia). Last but not least, online social networking has unleashed the power of individual’s social curiosity in such a way that millions of people are daily spending time on people networking. Nowadays, the challenge is to create new ICT artifacts enabling a wide diversity of individuals to quickly reach a minimum level of mutual understanding for supporting social interactions leading to new knowledge creation, hence leading to innovation which is the essence of collaboration. LIMITATIONS AND FUTURE RESEARCH

Factors affecting collaboration 36 The main objective of this paper is to report about the work carried out, in the area of Collaborative Working Environments, for characterizing a holistic view on distance factors and to provide a CDF to researchers and developers. It is our hope that this framework will also help in identifying new artifacts for bridging various distance types in, for example, creating new types of online proximity. The medium to long term goal is to get a collaborative distance phenomenology relating different empirical observations of distance phenomena to each other. Effectively, one distance factor might be also affecting other distance factors such as interpersonal relationships impacting trust and vice-versa. Therefore, networking distance factors among themselves and with observed phenomena would greatly contribute to increase the level of understanding and lead to a more effective and consolidated body of knowledge in this area. However, this study has a few limitations. Beside the impressive number of selected papers for the literature review, it might be potentially still possible to identify other distance types and related factors that would need to be included in this CDF. The different collaboration styles, from teamwork up to mass collaboration, were properly identified but we did not make a deeper examination in comparing the impact of various factors in between structured collaboration and unstructured collaboration. We made an attempt towards the disambiguation of concepts used to represent various distance types and related factors as well as reducing the number of concepts in identifying synonymous labels. Nonetheless, disentangling completely all distance types and related factors is still a challenge that would deserve the setting-up of a specific research community dedicated to Collaborative Distance. Deciphering the relationships among all distance types and related factors within the four dimensions proposed in this study

Factors affecting collaboration 37 requires voluntary work that could take place in the newly initiated Collaborative Distance wiki pages. This proposed framework might be used for further empirical studies that would select an integrative approach, as offered with the four dimensions, instead of looking at some factors in isolation. It could also be used by practitioners and ICT managers as a Capability Assessment Framework to evaluate the capabilities of online collaborative environments, collaborative infrastructures and collaboration tools. Developers could also use it for evaluating new collaboration artifacts and tools, expressed in term of features to be developed, for bridging various distance types. It would make sense that future work could be addressing virtual or online proximity, allowing a wide spectrum of cultural and organizational diversity necessarily supporting technologies and where and when to apply them in order to quickly reach the most appropriate level of mutual understanding while ensuring a high level of creativity and innovation. The ECOSPACE vision12 is to bring together semantic and social web (Web 2.0) through a usercentric interoperability approach towards the collaborative web or web 3.0. To achieve this vision, the proposed CDF helped to get the consciousness of emerging concepts and artifacts that will, soon or later, lead to the development of socially enabled technologies allowing groups of users to create their own eCollaboration world. There is also a lack of formalization of a generic collaboration process in the literature which means that there is a need to formalize a generic collaboration process (Pallot et Al, 2004) or meta-process which individuals apply when they are collaborating online. It would help to 12

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Factors affecting collaboration 38 define some metrics in this generic process for measuring the impact of distance factors on collaboration performance. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This work has been partly funded by the European Commission through the ECOSPACE IST Project13. The authors wish to acknowledge the European Commission for their support. They also wish to acknowledge their gratitude and appreciation to the Editor-In-Chief, Ned Kock, for his kind invitation to prepare this special issue on Collaborative Working Environments. Finally, they would like to thank the authors who contributed to this special issue with their articles.

13

http://www.ami-communities.eu/wiki/ECOSPACE

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Factors affecting collaboration 52 Pallot, M. and Sandoval, V. (1998). Concurrent Enterprising: Toward the Concurrent Enterprise in the era of the Internet and Electronic Commerce. Kluwer Academic Publishers - USA ISBN 0-7923-8172-6 Pallot, M. & Hof, K. (1999). FREE - Fast Reactive Extended Enterprise, The Results. Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising, ICE’99 The concurrent Enterprise in Operation. The Hague, The Netherlands Pallot, M., Pawar, K., Salminen, & V., Pillai, B. (2004). Business Semantics: The Magic Instrument Enabling Plug & Play Collaboration?. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising, ICE'2004 Adaptive Engineering for Sustainable Value Creation – Seville, Spain Pallot M., Prinz, W. & Schaffers, H. (2005). Future Workplaces, Towards the Collaborative Web. Proceedings of the AMI@Work Communities Forum Day, Munich, June 2005. Pallot, M., Ruland, R., Traykov, S. and Kristensen K. (2006) Integrating Shared Workspace, Wiki and Blog. Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising ICE 2006, 29. June 2006, Milan. Pallot M (2007). Why Webergence and Webergic Collaboration? A blog entry of the Webergence blog. Retrieved from: http://www.cwe-projects.eu/pub/bscw.cgi/737753?id=715404_737753 Pallot, M., Richir, S. & Samier, H. (2008). Shared Workspace and Group Blogging Experimentation through a Living Lab approach. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Concurrent Enterprising, ICE'2008 "A new wave of innovation in Collaborative Networks", Lisbon, Portugal, 23-25 June 2008

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Factors affecting collaboration 58 Marc Pallot is member of the Board of Directors and responsible for Collaborative Work and Infrastructure at ESoCE-NET. He is also research scientist at the Centre for Concurrent Enterprise, University of Nottingham, and teaching Collaborative Innovation at ISTIA, University of Angers, within several masters' degree classes dedicated to innovation. He is carrying out research in the domain of Collaborative Open Innovation and Living Labs, Collaborative Web Environments (Web 3.0) with a specific emphasis on Collaborative Distance and Interoperable Collaboration Services, and more specifically on People-Concepts Networking and Knowledge Connection. He is regularly involved in European research projects and has published numbers of papers and co-authored several books. He is co-founder and co-organizer of the annual ICE international conference since 1994 and member of various conference committees. He is member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and member of the Information Resources Management Association (IRMA). M. Antonia Martínez-Carreras has a PhD in computer science from the University of Murcia (Spain) since 2005. She is a Teaching Assistant Professor for Collaborative Environments at the University of Murcia. She also participates as a teacher in the Master of Information and Communication Technologies and Telematics, teaching in the course New Paradigms for Building Information Systems. Her research area is devoted to Cooperative Systems, CSCW, Groupware, CSCL, Context-Awareness and Interoperability issues. She has been working in the Department of Information and Communication Engineering since 1999 until now, where she was involved in several research projects funded by the European Commission such as ITCOLE, COLAB and ECOSPACE, a contract to act as a consultant in a Leonardo Project Replika and some national projects such as CAM4HOME. She has published several papers in national and international conferences and journals. Wolfgang Prinz has a PhD in computer science from the University of Nottingham. He is deputy head of Fraunhofer FIT (Institute for Applied Information Technology), division manager of the CSCW research department in FIT, and Professor for cooperation systems at the Technical University in Aachen. He is carrying out research in the area of Cooperative Systems, CSCW, Groupware, Communityware and Information systems. He participated in and managed several European and national research projects. Wolfgang Prinz published more than 100 papers and is member of a number of conference committees: Programme Chair of ECSCW’97, Co-Chair of GROUP’97 and

Factors affecting collaboration 59 '09 (ACM), Programme Co-Chair of WACC’99 (ACM) and M&C 2002, Co-Chair of E-CSCW 2001, member of the editorial board of the International Journal of CSCW (Kluwer), vice-chair of the Special Interest Group on CSCW of the German Informatics Society (GI), and he was chair of ACM SIGGROUP until 2004.

Factors affecting collaboration 60

Figure Captions Figure 1. Collaborative Distance Framework with its four dimensions and eighteen distance types Configurational distance Institutional distance Structural Dimension

Organizational distance Spatial distance Temporal distance

Relational distance Cultural distance Social Dimension

Emotional distance Lingual distance Cognitive distance

Collaborative Distance Framework Conceptual distance Contextual distance Technical Dimension

Referential distance Semantic distance Technological distance

Ownership distance Legal & Ethical Dimension

Financial distance Contractual distance

Table 1. Distance types, dimensions and factors impacting collaboration performance

St1

St2

St3

Distance Types

Dimen sions

Configurationa l

Institutional

Organizational

Distance-creating factors

Distance bridging factors

Description

References

on-line groups, communities and social networking, on-line project office. Interoperability

Clustering of members at sites, Role Index and External Index, clear leadership, Shared vision, collaboration incentive, balanced power and expertise in decision making

In this context, configuration is the arrangement of group members across sites, whatever are distances among them. Such configurations include: a “fully dispersed” team with only one member at each of several sites, a team with multiple members at multiple sites, or a team split across only two sites. Sub-group configurations can lead to conflict and how members who are isolated from the rest of the team tend to be left out of group communications and interactions.

(Grinter et Al. 1999), (Oldham et Al., 1995), (Ancona & Caldwell 1992), (Armstrong & Cole 2002), (O’Leary & Cunnings, 2002), (Cramton 2001), (Ketchen et Al., 1997; Meyer et Al., 1993).

Globalization, Contextual factors such as investment rules, legal framework, political climate (instability), lack of interoperability (e.g. institutional incompatibility).

Migration tides, colonial heritage, institutional presence, modern transportation. Interoperability

Internationalization experience, local political stability, overseas education, professional management training, Institutional convergence, Globalization set of business policies & regulations

Institutional distance is generated by differences among individuals according to their historical, political, economical and cultural/social environments that drive formal rules to be applied by those individuals. For example the EU is minimizing the national regulation divergence amongst members’ states as a kind of uniformisation of the business competition rules.

(Kirat & Lung 1999; North, 1997; Zeller, 2004), (Child et Al 2000), (Orlikowski 2002), (Johanson & Wiedersheim-Paul, 1975), (Nordstrom and Vahlne, 1992).

Multiple communication channels, lack of interoperability, not belonging to a same group or community; no behavioral cohesion

Belonging to the same cluster (i.e. firms, technological, innovations, Virtual Teams, Virtual professionals); Enterprises, on-line multidisciplinary groups and communities. communities (i.e. Interoperability prof. Community, community of practice, community of knowledge).

Organizational Distance represents the degree to which explicit or implicit rules of interaction and routines of behavior that makes coordination more effective are different. Individuals belonging to the same structure and using common routines are in organizational close proximity. The reverse situation implies that individuals are organizationally distant from each other.

(Meisters & werker 2004; Torre and Rallet, 2005); (Schamp et Al, 2004)

Activities context and globalization trend, dispersed teams, lack of leadership, incentive, cohesiveness and vision.

Structural

Ref

Distance compressing factors

St4

St5

Distance Types

Dimen sions

Distance-creating factors

Distance compressing factors

Distance bridging factors

Spatial

Fast transportation, Lack of collocation virtual or online and face-to-face collocation. communication Interoperability

Temporal

Collaboration tools Asynchronous mode; Lack of collocation supporting asynchronous Incremental and face-to-face interactions. formalization communication Interoperability

So1 Relational

Social

Ref

Positional situation, wrong relationships and inter-personal relationships, lack of social interaction ties and trust.

On-line groups, communities, networks, wiki, blog, on-line social networking, social translucence, social awareness

Short duration physical collocation (i.e. kick-off meeting)

Description

References

Spatial distance is directly conditioning the opportunity of collocation either permanent or temporal and physical face-to-face meetings. Close physical proximity is said to enable shared vision and understanding as well as knowledge sharing while remote working is considered as a barrier toward shared vision and understanding as well as knowledge sharing.

(Fischer 2005), (Olson & Olson 2001), (Brown & Duguid 2000), (Fischer et Al 2004; Raymond & Young 2001; Scharff 2002) (Kock, 2005), (Wilson et Al, 2005), (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006).

Time distortion (e.g. different time zones and different working shifts). Temporal (across time), requiring support for asynchronous, indirect, longterm communication.

(Finholt, Sproull, & Kiesler, 2001; Fischer 2004), (Thimbleby et Al 1990), (Moran & Caroll 1996), (Shipman, 1993).

(Lave & Wenger 1991; Brown & Duguid 1991; Relational distance is directly linked to the 1994; 2000; Wenger individual's network and relationship levels with 1998), (Créplet, other individuals. It is strongly related to human, Dupouet, & Vaast 2003), Trusted relationships, intellectual and social capital. Relational distance (Lindkvist 2005), (Swan, groups and conditions the level of mutual trust which enables Scarbrough, & Robertson communities, knowledge sharing and knowledge creation. Social 2002), (Nooteboom, personal or social distance is a measure of the extent to which the 2000; Grabher, 2004), networks, social individuals across organizations are familiar with (Putnam, 2000), capital, perceived each other’s ways of thinking and working and are (Constant, Sproull, & similarity, status at ease with them. Social distance is about the Kiesler 1996; Reagans & differences, role simplicity of the strength of weak ties or McEvily, 2003). centrality. complexity of strong ties. It is also about reaching (Bradshaw 2001; schamp a large number of people, and traverse greater et Al, Coenen et Al, social distance (i.e., path length). 2004), (Knoben & Oerlemans, 2006), (Luft & Ingham, 1955).

Ref

Distance Types

So2 Cultural

So3 Emotional

Dimen sions

Distance-creating factors

Due to international diversification, local usage and norms influencing individual and group behavior which generate difficulties in reaching a mutual understanding.

Demonstrative expressions (e.g. a distal or proximal expression); affective and emotional state and interpersonal awareness

Distance compressing factors

Tools for boundaryspanning — boundary objects — connecting people across geographical and cultural distances (e.g. simulational game); online communities

Tools for cognitive modeling; online multimedia meeting system; emotional avatars

Distance bridging factors

Description

References

Internationalization experience, overseas education, situational training, clusterisation (i.e. business sectors, innovation territories)

Cultural distance is the degree to which the norms and values of different organizations differ because of their place of origin. Cultural distance is the difference of local usage and norms influencing individuals' behavior, thoughts and interpretation. Cultural differences may appear at different levels such as geographical areas, industrial sectors, business areas, enterprises, networks or communities.

(Gill & Butler 2003; Gertler, 1995), (Levina & Vaast 2005), (Moon & Sproull 2002), (Gasson 2004), (Star & Griesemer 1989; Malone, Yates, & Benjamin 1987), (Zheng Ma, Pawar & Riedel 2006), (Boland & Tenkasi 1995), (Morosini et Al, 1998; Shenkar, 2001; West & Graham, 2004; Tihanyi et Al, 2005), (Brouthers & Brouthers, 2001), (Nooteboom, 2000; Bonifacio & Molani, 2003; Fischer, 2005b).

Past-time referent, JOHARI window, cognitive training, mirror approach

Emotional distance is related to the social climate such as face-to-face interaction making individuals less willing to voice opinions and suggestions, less objective and created feelings of sympathy or compassion for the co-located individuals. The social climate helps to create a less hostile and less inhibiting environment in which to talk to the other individuals. Spatial distance enables less personal and less emotional interactions. This spatial distance appears to help individuals maintain emotional distance and act more objectively in evaluating the alternatives proposed by the involved individuals.

(Byron & Stoia 2003), (Halliday & Hassan 1976), (Glover 2000), (Fussell et Al, 2004), (Piwek et Al, 1995), (Damian 2002), (AlRawas & Easterbrook 1996), (Basili 1996), (Damian, 2002), (Pallot et Al, 2008).

Ref

Distance Types

Dimen sions

Diversity (different domains, different Large amount of disciplines, technological capital, different practices); instant learning Novelty against absorptive capacity

Technical

So5 Cognitive

Conceptual

Distance compressing factors

Local languages, Automatic translators, different forms of writing leading to a online encyclopedia, online dictionary, lack of understanding

So4 Lingual

T1

Distance-creating factors

Online multidisciplinary Expertise gaps (i.e. groups and communities. novice vs. expert); Building-up online same concept name folksonomy, tagsonomy, and different concept mapping and meanings leading topic maps within use of to interpretations. wiki for shared meanings.

Distance bridging factors

Description

References

Translation, Shared language

Lingual distance determines the level of difficulty for a heterogeneous group of people to share meanings and understanding while at the same time it brings in diversity as languages are very much based on history, culture and tradition and therefore play a key role in cultural and cognitive behaviors.

(Wong and Trinidad 2004), (Biggs 1996).

Community of practice, Norm of reciprocity, Community-related and personal outcome expectations

Cognition denotes a broad range of mental activity, including proprioception, perception, sense making, categorization, inference, value judgments, emotions, and feelings, which all build on each other. People have developed along different life paths and in different environments, they interpret, understand and evaluate the world differently. This leads to the notion of cognitive distance between people. Different people have a greater or lesser 'cognitive distance' between them. The problem is that people may not understand each other and have to invest in understanding and largely depends on their absorptive capacity.

(Nooteboom, 1992, 1999, 2000; Grabher, 2004; Nooteboom et Al, 2006), (Cohendet, 2005).

Integrating diversity through multidisciplinary groups and communities. Making all voices heard. Establishing a common ground and shared meanings.

Conceptual distance is the degree to which disciplines' views and concepts are compatible. Conceptual barriers are often mentioned as being expertise gaps. Gentner’s structure-mapping theory of analogy emphasizes formal, shared syntactic relations between concepts. In contrast, Hofstadter and Mitchell’s ‘slipnets’ project emphasizes semantic similarities and employs connectionist notions of conceptual distance and activation to make analogy more dynamic and cognitively plausible. Conceptual distance across different communities of practice requires support for common ground and shared understanding.

(Gentner, 1983), (Liu and Singh 2004), (Hofstadter and Mitchell 1995), (Fischer,2004; 2005b), (Fischer 2001; Resnick 1991).

Ref

T2

T3

T4

T5

Distance Types

Contextual

Referential

Semantic

Technological

Dimen sions

Distance-creating factors Local and situational arrangements, conditions and rules are leading to cognitive overload

Distance compressing factors

Online context awareness automatically deducted from shared events and meta-data

Unevaluated Computerized degree of relevance formulation of relevance

Non related concepts.

Semantic web; Ontologies for specific applications.

Online instant learning; wide technology Incompatible knowledge and online technological skills tutorials and experimentation

Distance bridging factors

Description

References

Collecting information for building-up context awareness

Contextual distance is the degree to which local and situational arrangements, availability conditions and rules differ from one to one another. A common feature of situations leading to creative results lies in the contextual distance to the problem-relevant domain.

(Demetriadis et Al, 2005), (Gross & Prinz, 2003), (Prante, Magerkurth, & Streitz 2002), (Hymes & Olson 1992), (Finke, Ward & Smith 1992).

Correlation formulation

The referential distance corresponds to the distance between the point of origin and the correlating document measured by the number of the minimally necessary references. In this way it is possible to describe the potential relevance of a document compared to the origin of referencing. If the referential distance increases, the relevance can be expected to decrease.

(Fuchs-Kittowski & Köhler 2005), (Chakrabarti, Srivastava, Tiwari 2000; Croft, W., Turtle 1989)

Classification, taxonomy, ontology, semantic networks

Semantic distance, as well as semantic relatedness and semantic similarity (inverse of distance, also known as semantic proximity), represents the level (Norman and Hutchins, of relationship from one term to one another. It 1988), (Suchman, 1987), could be expressed by a number ranging from -1 (Bowers, 1993). up to 1, or between 0 and 1, where 1 display high relatedness and 0 for none.

Technological distance is the result of the Absorptive capacity, differences between the use of various training, seminar, technologies that could be either Information and tutorial, openness to Communication Technologies (ICT) or production experience, technologies and even a combination of other experience with technology types (i.e. Biology). Differences in technological experiences and knowledge dispersed work, technology and travel (between persons and artifacts), requiring knowledge-based, domain-oriented systems.

(Miralles, 2001), (Greunz 2003; Zeller, 2004; Cohen and Levinthal, 1990), (Clark and Fujimoto, 1991), (Fischer, 1994; Terveen, 1995), (Mayben et Al, 2003), (Mulder, 2002), (Pauleen & Yoong, 2001), (DeSanctis et Al, 2001).

L1

L2

Distance Types

Ownership

Financial

Dimen sions

Legal & Ethical

Ref

Distance-creating factors

Ownership divergence may lead to conflicting situation

Investment vulnerability, Contextual factors such as investment policies and rules leading to unbalanced investment behavior

Distance compressing factors

Distance bridging factors

Description

Ownership distance is the degree to which partners, either individuals or organizations, have different IPR policies. Ownership distance is also Online recording of induced by diverse local IPR regulations, views Tracking of individual's contributions individual's and opinions on innovation efficiency. It is argued (i.e. wiki, group blog). that innovation efficiency is based either open contributions, Open source and creative common IPR policies innovation through the implementation of open commons strategies. source or creative commons licensing mode, or more close innovation through intensive protection in terms of IPR, patents and so forth.

References

(Sawhney, 2002); (gupta, 2000); (Ristau Baca, 2005), (Pallot et Al, 2006).

The basic premise is that the value of a business relation depends on the participation of, and investments made by, the parties to the relation. In term of participation some actors may be indispensable to an asset. For instance, the asset may not be productive at all if the agent does not Shared risk and common value participate in the venture. More generally, (Hart & Moore 1990) mechanism, financial indispensable means that if the agent does not agreement participate in the under-taking-where the asset is used then the presence or absence of the asset does not affect the other agents’ investment behavior. Some investments are relation or asset specific meaning that their value outside the relation is very low.

Ref

L3

Distance Types

Contractual

Dimen sions

Distance-creating factors

Distance compressing factors

Incomplete contracting setting, Globalization Online proper level of effect, legal security, confidentiality framework, and privacy political climate (instability)

Distance bridging factors

Description

Contractual distance is often due to an incomplete contracting setting. Incomplete contracting and a formal contractual incentives for relation specific investments imply framework, the following. If contracting is costless and internationalization information perfect then the allocation of experience, local ownership matters little for the organization of political stability, economic activity. Any profitable venture overseas education, requiring the participation of several parties can be professional realized by drafting a suitable contract specifying management training the participants’ rights and obligations under every conceivable circumstance.

References

(Hart and Moore, 1990), (Grossman & Hart 1986), (Silverston, 2004), (Appelt et Al, 2007), (Introna, 2005).