Tech support engineers' communication in a chat tool

Abstract

Organizations are increasingly interested in facilitating collaboration in distributed groups. In this study, I examine three distributed groups of technical support engineers at a large high technology company who have integrated a real-time text chat tool into their work practice. Effective use of the chat tools in these three groups interacts with group norms and group structure. Highly collaborative group norms mean that people receive responses to questions in the chat tool. This decreases the need to know 'who knows what,' because members do not need to target their questions to receive a response. Members also adapt their use of the tool to reflect the group structure, specifically the roles within the group and the range of problems the group solves. Active participation by experts across sites increases the likelihood an individual will receive a useful answer to a question. Groups solving a bounded range of problems tend to use the tool for technical problem solving more than for workflow coordination.