Social Context and Interaction in Ongoing Computer-Supported Management Groups

Abstract

Electronic communication has been proposed as a key technology enabling new organization forms and structures, work designs, and task processes. This view assumes that organization structure and form can be defined in terms of communication linkages among organizational units. Communication is a social process, however. Therefore, to better understand the potential for these technologies to enable fundamental organizational change, we must understand how existing structures and social contexts influence patterns of organizational communication. This research examined the use of electronic messaging by ongoing management groups performing a cooperative task. By means of an in-depth multimethod field study of the editorial group of two daily newspapers, it examined the influence of the groups’ social context on the patterns of face-to-face and computer-mediated communication. The results show that different groups using the same functional structure and performing the same task with identical communication technologies, but operating within different social contexts, appropriated the communication technology differently and in a way that was consistent with and reinforcing to their existing social structure. This finding suggests that researchers must, at the very least, explicitly take into account social context when studying the effects of introducing technologies which may alter group interaction. Additionally, researchers should look to social context as an important explanatory construct to be explicitly varied and investigated with regard to effects and outcomes of these technologies. The findings also suggest that managers must diagnose and explicitly manage the social context of the workplace prior to implementing technologies, if their intent is to restructure the patterns of interaction and information exchange in support of new organizational forms.