who need them. Too often, specialised medical knowledge remains within the walls of academic and tertiary care centres in capitals and major cities, inaccessible to much of the world's population due ...to geographical distance and economic disparity. To “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”, UN Sustainable Development Goal 3, a more efficient and equitable way to disseminate new scientific knowledge and evidence-based expertise is needed.
Fast-response virtual teams (FRVTs) have been developed as a response to emergent challenges faced by organizations that need to be addressed urgently. Even though FRVTs offer enormous potential in ...terms of their benefits, their success is not guaranteed. When used, the need for high performing FRVTs has become critical for organizational success. However, there is a lack of detailed understanding of how sensemaking can potentially influence FRVT performance. Drawing on social exchange theory, we identify swift trust as a potential antecedent of sensemaking. In this paper, we report the results of a study that examined the effects of swift trust on sensemaking and the effects of sensemaking on team performance in FRVTs. The study included 20 FRVTs and 80 team participants. Analysis of data shows that FRVTs' swift trust is positively correlated with all three dimensions of sensemaking and only the linguistic and conative development aspects of sensemaking affects FRVT performance.
Background Blood banks are an important part of healthcare systems. They embrace critical processes that start with donor recruitment and blood collection, followed by blood processing to produce ...different types of blood components used in transfusions, blood storage, blood distribution, and transfusion. Blood components must be generated at high quality, preserved safely, and transfused in a timely manner. This can be achieved by operating interrelated processes within a complex network. There is no comprehensive blueprint of Blood Banking and Transfusion (BB&T) processes and their relationships; therefore, this study aims to develop and evaluate a BB&T process architecture using the Riva method. Research design This research adopts a design science research methodology process (DSRM) that aims to create artifacts for the purpose of serving humanity through six phases: identifying problems, identifying solutions and objectives, designing and developing artifacts, demonstrating and evaluating the artifacts, and communicating the work. The adapted DSRM process is used to build a process architecture in the BB&T unit to improve the quality and strategic planning of BB&T processes. Applying the adapted DSRM process generated four increments before the outcomes were communicated as a highly comprehensive BB&T process architecture (BB&TPA) blueprint for virtual organizations. Finally, the generated BB&TPA is tested and validated at a reference hospital. Results A Riva-based process architecture diagram was successfully developed, acting as a reference model for virtual BB&T organizations. It is a novel output in the domain of BB&T and can also be considered as a reference model to evaluate the existing processes in BB&T real-world units. This assists domain experts in performing gap analysis in their BB&T units and paths for developing BB&T management information systems and can be incorporated in the inspection workflow of accreditation organizations.
Digital teamwork has become prevalent and is ever since becoming part of the human work- and life-style, globally. But in comparison with face-to-face setting, virtual teams face multifold ...challenges. To date, scarce empirical research has examined whether team-breaking challenges are associated with limited access to peer nonverbal signals. This study examines whether access to body signals is associated with effective teamwork, and whether limited access provokes key team challenges. We also examine what social-psychological team concepts can be detected from peers' consciously or unconsciously displayed visual cues that cannot be as effectively gained without visual access. 14 dyadic teams of MBA students were examined in an online business negotiation task to reach an authentic commercial deal. Half of the teams negotiated only through voice and text, while the other half had camera access as well. Using an exploratory mixed methods analysis, we identified 12 unique team factors based on nonverbal data. We also found that teams with camera access could build mutual trust more rapidly, detect peer honesty better, and realize agreements on suggestions more accurately. Surprisingly, we also found instances where camera access became stressful and participants reported it as an additional burden. Conclusions and implications are reported at the end.
•The virtual team lifespan influences what coordination practices will emerge.•Two temporal coordination practices were identified: tight and loose.•Tight coordination helps to reduce uncertainty in ...the fuzzy front-end.•Loose coordination allows dispersed members to work complementarily together.
In this paper, we study the role of temporal coordination in managing the early stages of innovation (aka fuzzy front-end) in the context of virtual teams. Following a comparative case study approach, we detail the role of temporal coordination through the study of two contrasting virtual teams—one with a 24-h lifespan, and one with a five-month lifespan—from two Industry-Academia collaboration projects. Our approach was longitudinal capturing virtual team activities from start to end of each project, and involved multiple data collection methods, including observations and interviews. The findings reveal that the virtual team lifespan influences the type of temporal coordination that emerges. In virtual teams with short lifespans, tight coordination with frequent communication can help to reduce the uncertainty characterizing the fuzzy front-end. On the other hand, in virtual teams with longer lifespans, loose coordination allows dispersed members to work simultaneously on different, complementary aspects of the task at hand. These findings extend scholarly understanding around how innovation activities are coordinated in technology-mediated environments, such as virtual teams. Finally, we discuss theoretical and managerial implications.
Context: There have been numerous recent calls for research on the human side of software engineering and its impact on various factors such as productivity, developer happiness and project success. ...An analysis of which challenges in software engineering teams are most frequent is still missing. As teams are more international, it is more frequent that their members have different human values as well as different communication habits. Additionally, virtual team setups (working geographically separated, remote communication using digital tools and frequently changing team members) are increasingly prevalent. Objective: We aim to provide a starting point for a theory about contemporary human challenges in teams and their causes in software engineering. To do so, we look to establish a reusable set of challenges and start out by investigating the effect of team virtualization. Virtual teams often use digital communication and consist of members with different nationalities that may have more divergent human values due to cultural differences compared to single nationality teams. Method: We designed a survey instrument and asked respondents to assess the frequency and criticality of a set of challenges, separated in context "within teams" as well as "between teams and clients", compiled from previous empirical work, blog posts, and pilot survey feedback. For the team challenges, we asked if mitigation measures were already in place to tackle the challenge. Respondents were also asked to provide information about their team setup. The survey included the Personal Value Questionnaire to measure Schwartz human values. Finally, respondents were asked if there were additional challenges at their workplace. The survey was first piloted and then distributed to professionals working in software engineering teams via social networking sites and personal business networks. Result: In this article, we report on the results obtained from 192 respondents. We present a set of challenges that takes the survey feedback into account and introduce two categories of challenges; "interpersonal" and "intrapersonal". We found no evidence for links between human values and challenges. We found some significant links between the number of distinct nationalities in a team and certain challenges, with less frequent and critical challenges occurring if 2-3 different nationalities were present compared to a team having members of just one nationality or more than three. A higher degree of virtualization seems to increase the frequency of some human challenges, which warrants further research about how to improve working processes when teams work from remote or in a distributed fashion. Conclusion: We present a set of human challenges in software engineering that can be used for further research on causes and mitigation measures, which serves as our starting point for a theory about causes of contemporary human challenges in software engineering teams. We report on evidence that a higher degree of virtualization of teams leads to an increase of certain challenges. This warrants further research to gather more evidence and test countermeasures, such as whether the employment of virtual reality software incorporating facial expressions and movements can help establish a less detached way of communication.
•The first study of faultlines in the context of automated team-formation.•A description of the efficiency principles required for faultline-aware team formation.•An efficient faultline measure that ...can be used for both measurement and team-formation.•A complexity analysis of the problem of partitioning a population to low-faultline teams.•An efficient algorithm for the problem of partitioning a population to low-faultline teams.
In recent years, the proliferation of online resumes and the need to evaluate large populations of candidates for on-site and virtual teams have led to a growing interest in automated team-formation. Given a large pool of candidates, the general problem requires the selection of a team of experts to complete a given task. Surprisingly, while ongoing research has studied numerous variations with different constraints, it has overlooked a factor with a well-documented impact on team cohesion and performance: team faultlines. Addressing this gap is challenging, as the available measures for faultlines in existing teams cannot be efficiently applied to faultline optimization. In this work, we meet this challenge with a new measure that can be efficiently used for both faultline measurement and minimization. We then use the measure to solve the problem of automatically partitioning a large population into low-faultline teams. By introducing faultlines to the team-formation literature, our work creates exciting opportunities for algorithmic work on faultline optimization, as well as on work that combines and studies the connection of faultlines with other influential team characteristics.
The advent of globalisation has led to the growing use of global virtual teams (GVT) for software development. The use of such teams enables organisations to operate across national, economic and ...social, and cultural boundaries; this new form of teamwork presents challenges for traditional coordination mechanisms. Hence, a range of new operational problems for the coordination of software development teams have emerged due to the nature of virtual work: these are related to issues of geographical distance, language differences, time zone(s) differences, cultural differences, and trust. This paper applies a theoretical model drawn from prior research to explore the coordination mechanisms employed by a global virtual software development team in a major multi-national telecommunications organisation. The study analyses the impact that the aforementioned issues have on the effectiveness of project team coordination mechanisms and then develops a refined conceptual model to guide future research on global virtual software development teams. The findings also inform practice on the problems encountered in ensuring the effective coordination of such teams.
Virtual communities consist of social media users whose relationships are strengthened through information and knowledge transfers, as well as interactions among members. A new connection between ...customer feedback and brand modeling has been formed through social media. Therefore, this research aims to enhance effective management of enterprise social media platforms, as the key to prosperity in social media is built on the knowledge sharing behavior of users. The study employs the theory of innovation resistance and summarizes 27 factors of barriers encountered by users during the knowledge sharing process in enterprise social media. These factors are further categorized into seven dimensions of resistance, such as usage barriers, value barriers, physical risks, trust risks, security belief barriers, mutual benefit belief barriers, and image barriers. The validity of the scales is confirmed by using the corroboration process of factor analysis. The strategic implications of the barriers are explored, and recommendations to overcome those barriers are proposed as part of management of enterprise social media sites.
•Social media is a new connection between customer feedback and brand modeling.•The prosperity of social media is built on users' knowledge sharing behavior.•This study employs innovation resistance theory and summarizes users' barriers.•The strategic recommendations to overcome those barriers are proposed.
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