Coordinative Practices and Information Interaction Performance in Distributed Work

New ICTs and intensive digital collaboration have potential for enhancing collaborative work. Much of modern work involves dealing with information representations of various types and forming insights and decisions based on that information. The objective of the study is to understand how accessibility of information is linked to the successfulness of coordination in distributed work. In distributed work, the collaborators and the resources of the work are spatially and temporally distributed. The goal for this study is to conceptualise and empirically specify the core drivers and shapers influencing information interaction performance in the coordination of distributed work. The research questions of the study are: What kind of coordinative practices does distributed work require, what factors shape these practices and how these practices influence information interaction performance. The study contributes to coordination theory through examination of the challenges and performance of information interaction related to coordination in diverse work environments. The study analyses the nature of coordinative practices, the shapers of these practices and effects of coordinative practices on information interaction performance success. Maintenance of situation awareness and management of experience knowledge were approached as comprehensive, information-intensive coordinative practices applied in distributed work. The overall formation of coordination practices are hypothesized to be shaped by the nature of interdependencies, social capital, technological affordances and spatio-temporal dispersion between collaborators. It is proposed that these factors influence and enable success in information interaction performance in distributed work. The study is an in-depth multi-method comparative multiple-case study executed in diverse real-life work contexts. The multiple case studies empirically examine the framework for explaining formation of coordinative practices and information interaction performance success developed in the study. The contexts studied in the case studies include process control in the chemical industry, technical support service in machinemaintenance business, service production in the telecommunications industry and security services in facilities’ maintenance. The study shows that the nature and characteristics of interdependence patterns within distributed activities and resources influence the coordination needs in distributed work. Interdependence complexity creates challenging coordination needs, in large numbers, the management of which requires coordination practices. The results of the study show that the interdependency complexity does not make successful coordination impossible. The better the fit between, on one hand, the scope and nature of the coordination mechanisms applied in the distributed work and, on the other, the level of coordination challenge involved, the more successful and disturbance-free the information interaction performance will be. The appropriateness of the coordination practices with respect to the real-world coordination needs is directly reflected in the quality of the information interaction performance of the collaborative actors. High spatio-temporal dispersion among collaborators does not make good coordination impossible. However, in order to enable the best possible fit of coordination practice to associated coordination challenge, higher social capital among collaborators and higher variety of actually applied technological affordances in the coordination enhance the fit, regardless of the overall level of interdependence portfolio complexity. The study provides practitioners of work design and work-process development with conceptual tools to analyse information interaction in distributed work and uncover the root causes of information interaction performance disturbances and successes. Conceptual tools assist practitioners in observing coordinative practices and factors shaping these practices, and in unlocking potential for current practices’ enhancement.