Toward an Organizational View of E-Collaboration

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Author(s): Lior Fink (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel)
Copyright: 2009
Pages: 15
Source title: Virtual Team Leadership and Collaborative Engineering Advancements: Contemporary Issues and Implications
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Ned Kock (Texas A&M International University, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-110-0.ch002

Keywords: Information Science Reference / Media & Communications / Social Computing / Virtual Communities & Virtual Reality

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Abstract

This chapter develops an organizational view of the roles and impacts of e-collaboration. Drawing on the dynamic capabilities perspective, e-collaboration is conceptualized as a change-oriented capability that enables a firm to identify, integrate, and apply its knowledge assets to meet competitive demands. Therefore, e-collaboration potentially has three organizational roles – coordination, learning, and innovation – that are associated with either efficiency impacts or competitive impacts. Drawing on contingency theory, the main argument developed in this chapter is that firms in less dynamic business environments need e-collaboration for operational purposes, emphasizing the coordination role, whereas firms in highvelocity business environments need e-collaboration for strategic purposes, emphasizing the learning and innovation roles. An analysis of the way in which business environment characteristics interact with media characteristics serves to demonstrate the importance of strategic characteristics – in addition to media and task characteristics – in determining the organizational effectiveness of e-collaboration.

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