Michael Shulman's Shared Notes

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@Seely2015

  • Title: The Sociomateriality of Teamwork Processes
  • Year:: 2015
  • Author:: Peter Seely
  • DT link::
  • Tags:: make-public
  • Discovered from: Steve shared this with me, after I first really spoke to him of my interest in technology to connect groups of people.
  • Note - pagination makes no sense, since it's a dissertation and I reformatted the double-spaced Word doc into an easier-to-read PDF
  • Brain Dump / Questions:
    • The measure they use, "process sociomateriality," is a 50-item measure (actually seems to be 56 items) where all questions begin to what extent did the team actively work to "use new media" to/for various purposes.
      • That seems like a funny term, if it's just trying to refer to new technologies.
        • Just analogous to "communication technology" - it can refer to any form of electronic communication.
        • ❓That's interesting. Does it not look at ideas of knowledge management or Processes of Thinking in teams - tools like Roam, or Notion (outside of the project management part of it)?
        • ❓Is he going to focus on asynchronous work?
          • (Mentions in a section on affordances and constrains that Zoom might enable face-to-face conversations, but it limits asynchronous work; and email constrains the ability to work in real-time.)

  • TOC:

      1. Abstract & Summary
      1. Chapter 1: Introduction
      1. Chapter 2: Literature Review
      • a. Teams and Team Process
      • b. Communication Technology and Teams
      1. Chapter 3: Advancing a Theory of Team Process and Technology Use Through the Lens of Sociomateriality
      • a. Sociomateriality: Combining Human- and Technology-Centric Forces
      • b. Sociomateriality and Team Process
      1. Chapter 4: Program of Research
      • a. Study 1 – Qualitative Critical Incident Study
      • b. Study 2 – Measure Development and Pilot Testing
      • c. Study 3 – Quasi Field Study
      1. Chapter 5: General Discussion
      • a. Theoretical Contributions
      • b. Practical Implications
      • c. Limitations and Future Research Directions
      1. References
      1. Tables
      1. Figures
      1. Appendices

  • Notes

  • Expanding the ideas of the relationship between "process behaviors" and the use of technology in teams.
    • For example - the team process behavior of asynchronous vs. synchronous document editing is not the same.
  • Focused on taskwork behaviors.
  • Prior work on tech had looked from just tech perspective (Kirkman & Mathieu, 2005), and other work had ignored tech and just focused on humans (Marks, Mathieu, & Zaccaro, 2001). This one combines - hence the term "process sociomateriality."
    • It is no longer enough for team process to just look at things from the human side
    • "Technology not only enables traditional process, but also expands the behavioral repertoire that is available to teams" quote
  • 3 aims - develop conceptual taxonomy of how tech can affect team processes; create a measure to capture this; show how tech use shapes emergent states and performance.
    • Sounds like looking for more than just communication.
  • 3 studies:
      1. Qualitative, critical incident - to develop construct, which results in a taxonomy with 3 higher order factors:
      • Process Facilitation, Process Impairment, and Process Expansion.
      • So helping, hurting, qualitatively changing.
      • This was all based on a semester long class project, from 89 participants.❗This worries me - it means that the qualitative ideas they developed from this analysis are most relevant to this particular type of project - was it a project that scales well to other types of work? The types of work that I'm interested in? critique
        • Eh. That was just to generate qualitative data that they coded to create the sociomateriality measure
      1. Survey development, piloting - to develop measure
      1. Quasi field study - effects of this new idea on team functioning and emergent states
      • Findings mostly concern Facilitation and Expansion - not Impairment. ❓Does that mean that tech can help more than it can hurt? How does this relate to the idea of technostress?
      • ❓Is he going to focus on asynchronous work?
  • Forming taxonomy for how tech is linked to team processes
  • Claims that missing how people have the autonomy to change the tech their team uses means something is missing from the literature that looks at how emergent states are affected by technology - he says that previous work had "maintained that use of technology is an irrevocable force that deterministically shapes team outcomes (e.g. Kirkman & Mathieu, 2005; Maynard et al., 2012; Schweitzer & Duxbury, 2010)" (pagination odd here).

  • Chapter 2 - Literature Review

  • Lit review divided into 2 sections - one on teams and team processes, another on tech and teams (largely the lens of "virtuality")

  • Chapter 3: Advancing a Theory of Team Process and Technology Use Through the Lens of Sociomateriality

    • Term reflects that most things that are "social" are also "material" - can't look at the social processes without also looking at the tech materials involved.
      • (Which literature is this in? Social Psych? Journals seem to be business, or organizational stuff. No one else used in the context of teams? Is that it?)
      • This previous perspective ignores the role of human agency.
    • This dissertation bringing sociomateriality lens to team processes.
    • Theory of sociomateriality draws from two other theories:
      • Social constructivism - focus on humans to shape workplace
        • Humans have the agency to shape the way they work - and even when tech is highly constraining, they'll still exhibit agency to shape the way they work
        • Recent decades, one theory using this emerged strongest: Adaptive Structuration Theory, where tech has a way its supposed to be used, but humans can appropriate the tech as they wish, whether that fits with original structure or not.
          • This theory gives equal weight to human and social contexts.
          • me This still sees humans as working to shape tech that works a certain way, to the way they work. It doesn't seem to allow for tech properly addressing how humans actually think together. Not a tools for thought perspective.
          • me It also does not address that specific technologies can provide new capabilities. emergent phenomenon
      • materiality - focus on how a tool, like tech, shapes the form of work
        • Theory here says that tech is an affordance or an inhibitor of human action (Hutchby, 2001).
          • See Table 1 for example of tech affordances!
            • Columns are provision by email, in-person, chat, social media, videoconference (very limiting list!!)
            • Rows are affordances:
              • Interaction Storage/Reflection
              • Synchronous Interaction
              • Social Cue Transmission
              • Multifunctionality
              • Textual Exchange
        • His new idea, sociomateriality says that workplace functioning is a function of a synergy between how humans choose to use their tech (Adaptive Structuration Theory) and the affordances and/or constrains of the tech itself *.
          • He seems to see the contribution of this largely being the consideration of agency that humans have to choose the tech they use, and how they use it.
        • process sociomateriality is the term he introduces. Enmeshment of the tech affordances, and social interaction during taskwork.
          • In a process of imbriation, these social and material forces interact and over time shape team interaction.
            • Imbriation of social onto material, leads to tech use for prior social practices
            • Imbriation of material onto social, leads to tech use shaping how people interact.
              • me This is the key point - which I don't think he takes far enough.
                • quote "At first, team members may adjust their use of this tool to accommodate prior work routines and processes; however, the new tool may eventually open the door to interacting and accomplishing taskwork in novel ways. For instance, a newly formed team may initially utilize email simply to facilitate communication amongst team members. Over the course of taskwork, however, team members may come to also use email as a repository for useful task information and as a portal for progress monitoring.
                  • me These are both existing processes! Take this farther - the tech can enable new ways of working, new modes of thinking. That has to be one of my
                    Three dimensions:
                    • First is communication richness. This is what @Kirkman.Mathieu2005 started. But I believe they saw video chats as the richest. I'd go farther:
                      • Communication richness is everything involved in mimicking real-time in-person communication, via technology. Simple text is simplest, richer text is richer, allowing multiple text conversations to happen simultaneously in the same discussion space is richer still, video chats can be richer still. All true.
                      • But it must go farther. Lag in audio communication, as it approaches the limits of our perception, are richer still. Virtual reality, where people are arranged in space around us, and their facial expressions moved onto avatars, if the technology we must wear on our faces prevents video picking up our own faces; augmented reality or holographic images, where they are arranged on the physical furniture in our own world, richer still. Spatial audio, so that voices come from where people are situated, which allows for multiple people to talk at once and for our well-trained brains to deal with this in XR as it does in real life.
                      • Could be that tactile tech goes in this category, where the point is just to enrich communication. Not sure about this one.
                        • (January 4th, 2021 See thoughts on differentiating between communication richness as between humans, and between human and computer.)
                    • Second is when technology enables new medium for thought, or tools for thought. This one is less of a continuum, since the exact parameters are not clear, and there are many different types of cognitive processes that technology might focus on aiding. But certainly, technologies can be super helpful here or ignore it, or anywhere in between.
                      • Some examples - ranging from early ones we take for granted already, but which did enrich our ability to work, to more complex and some future applications:
                      • Google Docs, allowing for multiple people to work together on the same document. Not possible with paper, or with single-user word processors
                      • (First use of AR for business) - design-type applications, where seeing a physical manifestation of an idea in real-space increases creativity.
                      • Personal wiki softwares, that enable individuals to easily recall previously read information or previously thought-of ideas, and consider how they can apply. The richest examples of such softwares allow for the entry of very micro-level ideas, whether original or quoted, to tag multiple other ideas or projects where such ideas might apply, and to have these micro-level ideas surface automatically whenever the tagged entities are viewed. This offshoring of the remembrance of detail to computers, a capacity which humans are limited in, allows humans to focus on their strength of finding connections and patterns across ideas and contexts.
                      • Need to read more, and come up with more examples.
                        • Computer science articles will be helpful here - the ones beginning with quoting Doug Engelbart's work.
                    • Third, regarding robots and AI, is the ability of computers to make independent contributions to an effort.
                      • Whether the AI or robot has a physical manifestation is not directly relevant to its making independent contributions - that's just a question of whether physical presence makes a robot more or less threatening; or even if the physical presence focuses the attention of humans there, and helps them ignore other areas where a computer might be contributing independently.
                      • Low levels of this dimension might be able to follow instructions coded in the moment, to summarize information. But it must be asked for in the moment, and the parameters set clearly.
                      • High up in the dimension is AI that can proactively contribute information, learning what would be valuable, then seeking the original information, summarizing it and presenting it to humans. Make conclusions about the information - currently, pT7st9JdR
                      • (Where do robots that help with physical tasks come in? Or should I ignore the physical and focus on just knowledge work? )
                      • There is an element, too, where the traditional method has been to assign human and robots to separate functions, but more recent advances have advanced the vision where robots and humans will have a working relationship that mimics that of humans with each other.
                    for the Tech in MTSs review dimension

  • 5. Chapter 4: Program of Research *

    • quote "Prominent scholars of sociomateriality assert that in order to comprehensively understand the construct space of the phenomenon, researchers should conduct in-depth analysis of instances in which human behavior is inherently entangled with technology use (Leonardi, 2013; Orlikowski, 2009)."
    • He's using really traditional tools - WebEx, GoogleGroups, Basecamp
    • Study 1, did project where used above tools and could also choose their own. Then gave them prompt to thnk about helpful and hurtful ways new media worked for them. Included in Appendix A- worth looking at.
    • Gave him new measure of sociomateriality, 16 categories arranged into 3 higher order categories:
      Process Facilitation, Process Impairment, and Process Expansion.
      • See Tables 4-6 for the lower-order categories.
      • Process facilitation includes 6 lower-order behaviors. Basic idea - the tech helps with existing team processes - all of which have been identified by previous research (but not identified as being enacted via tech - that's what he's contributing.)
        • Idea generation
          • (producing task-relevant ideas. This is thought to be good for creativity.)
          • Study 1 found teams often used tech to facilitate brainstorm - using variety of tools. So they saw different affordances in different tools, and capitalized on that.
        • Idea evaluation
          • Evaluating ideas, goal of coming to consensus.
          • Communication tech in current study found to be helpful for this - quick get people's opinions, use polls. etc.
        • Activity synchronization
          • coordinate member actions in the achievement of taskwork
        • role and task assignment
        • team monitoring and backup
          • Tech tools can be very useful with team monitoring, providing "readily observable markers of task progress"
          • Think dashboards. (Useful especially because someone who is good at creating it can make it, and the rest of the team can just see it.)
        • motivation and confidence building
          • disagree Eh. Sort of saying the tech helped this because it let them have video convos, and chat on Facebook Messenger. But that is nothing about how the tool itself encourages doing this in a positive way that builds motivation and confidence, versus hurts it.
      • "Process expansion depicts team processes that are enabled, scaffolded, and/or supported by technology. This dimension reflects collaborative team process behaviors that unique rise through the use of technology."
        • Behaviors not captured by current conceptualizations of team process
          • me What I don't think he will do - which is where I can still come in - is that he's really looking to identify the exact sub-dimensions or team processes that uniquely emerge from modern technology.
            • but that's still just modern tech, not what's coming down the line
            • And it's a very limited picture of modern tech - really just adding Slack, Zoom, Google Docs, Project Management tools.
            • Also - these exact dimensions are not a good picture of a continuum of larger dimensions that I want to articulate, I think. So I can still have a job putting these into just one set of dimensions, that capture both existing processes that we know of (that might have been possible without tech), processes that exist today that might be new to the tech we have today, and processes that we might not yet even be aware of (emergent phenomenon).
        • 6 sub dimensions:
          • Simultaneous Collaboration
            • me This is part of bridging time and space, to get people as if they were in the same room. Convo with Abba November 7th, 2020 were saying this is closer to the communication richness dimension.
              • Hmm. Actually take this back. He does say this is about the materiality of the tool letting people have a "real-time mental collaboration" that would not otherwise be possible.
              • So I may not think he articulates this perfectly - but the way I would put this is, these are tools/materialities/affordances that let us synchronize our mental processes without having to explicitly encode/decode.
                • me that part about skipping the encoding/decoding is a key part of what came from my discussion with Abba November 7th, 2020.
          • Creating Scaffolds/ Artifacts
            • Create "external representations of (their) workflow and work products"
            • this lets teams offload thoughts and ideas into a platform, which lets the free up cognitive resources
              • again - me my interpretation of this is that is lets them skip much of the encoding/decoding process - because it provides the context to the communication. (At the very least, it lets them skip providing the context! That's a big save by itself.)
            • Stephen Fiore has a lot of work here - tech interfaces letting team members leave marks of interaction or productivity (Fiore, Rosen, Smit-Jentsch, Salas, Letsky, & Warner, 2010); freeing up cognitive resources for other things (Cuevas, Fiore, Caldwell, & Strater, 2007); scaffolds or artifacts can take different forms (Fore & Schooler, 2004).
          • Automated Coordination Facilitation
            • Coordination is "orchestrating the sequence and timing of interdependent action" (Marks et al. 2001, pg. 636), and is essential to team functioning (Brannick, Prince, Prince,, & Salas, 2002; Flieshman & Zaccaro, 1992; Marks et al., 2001). Tech can help automate this.
            • His examples - automated reminds about future tasks, reminder of doing things for the project.
            • critique Not articulated clearly enough - things like project planning, Gantt charts built into PM itself, so that you can adaptively change the whole project if one piece gets pushed out, so everything that is reliant on that can get sequenced appropriately.
          • Interaction Variability
            • Teams can mix and match, using the tool that best matches the needs for a specific thing. So brainstorming can use real-time video chat, asynchronous stuff can happen via email, Google Docs for real-time collaboration, etc.
            • Defined as "team members using multiple channels to enable them to think both independently and jointly, while working synergistically and avoiding process loss."
          • Bridging Time
            • Lets teams work asynchronously, enabling team members to "process, interpret, and respond on their own time." So tech is "expanding the boundaries of teamwork beyond that of real-time synchronous collaboration."
          • Bridging Space
            • Can work with others in different places. Self-explanatory.
        • process impairment
          • Tech isn't all rosy. It has some obstacles - so most effective teams will be the ones that leverage the benefits, and manage these 4 sub-dimensions of process impairment: familiarity, preference, technology/process mismatch, and technology breakdown:
            • active_reading Will he acknowledge that the best tech tools are build to try and make them intuitive for new users, specifically? And that the younger generation might pick up more quickly on this - so that's part of what you might consider when choosing newer tech tools?
            • Familiarity
              • Ineffcient when some less tech savvy team members don't know how to use an new tool - each tool has its own variations
                • me (And the ones that are most powerful because they change a paradigm are often most different from previously seen tools. Like RoamResearch!)
            • Preference
              • since tools are different, different team members may have preferences for which tools they choose to use (I suppose when it's not dictated by the organization. Again - I'm a prime example here.)
            • Technology-Process Mismatch
              • When the tool doesn't match the needs of the team, perhaps at their current phase.
              • Like during transition phase, teams might need to plan more synchronously
                • me Or, for MTSs, we've indicated before that transition phases might be characterized by more intensive between-team interactions - tech must match that need Tech in MTSs review MTS
            • Technological Breakdown
              • If relying on tech to perform a function, and it doesn't - hardware malfunction, software issues, other tech difficulties.
                • (This is where FirstBaseHQ tries to help, making sure that team members have fast internet, good mics, etc. It's some part of this.)
  • Potentially Interesting Sources Mentioned:
    • On technology use in teams:
      • Gibson & Gibbs, 2006
      • Hertel, Geister, & Konradt, 2005
      • Kirkman & Mathieu, 2005 (read)
      • Olson & Olson, 2000
    • On technology as a moderator of team input-outcome
      • Bierly, Stark, & Kessler, 2009
      • Kirkman, Rosen, Tesulk, & Gibson, 2004
    • On technology and the human having an "inxtrincable linkage"
      • Leonardi, 2011
      • Orlikowski & Scott, 2008
    • On team process being an "emergent phenomenon in which member interaction and coordination is embodied in technology use" *
      • Hoch & Kozlowski, 2012
      • Kanawattanachai & Yoo, 2002
      • Schweitzer & Duxbury, 2010
    • On tech enabling some team interactions, and constraining others:
      • Knappett, C. & Malafouris, L. (2010). Material and nonhuman agency: An introduction. In C. Knappett & L. Malafouris (Eds.), Material Agency: Towards a non-anthropocentric approach (pp. ix-xvii). New York: Springer Science.
    • On virtuality
      • Dixon & Panteli, 2010
      • Griffith, Sawyer, & Neale, 2003
      • Schweitzer& Duxbury, 2010
      • Gilson, Maynard, Young, Vartiainen, & Hakonen, 2015
      • Gibson and Gibbs (2006)
      • Dixon & Panteli, 2010
      • Leenders, Engelen, & Kratzer, 2003
      • Schiller & Mandviwalla, 2007, for theoretical influences
    • Why all the tech citations so old? This is a paper from 2015!
    • On using diagrams to facilitate learning, helpful for integrative knowledge:
      • Cuevas, H. M., Fiore, S. M., & Oser, R. L. (2002). Scaffolding cognitive and metacognitive processes in low verbal ability learners: Use of diagrams in computer-based training environments. Instructional Science, 30(6), 433-464. paper
    • On scaffolding, where tech is external representation of the work that's being done, and all the ways that's helpful:
      • Stephen Fiore has a lot of work here - tech interfaces letting team members leave marks of interaction or productivity (Fiore, Rosen, Smit-Jentsch, Salas, Letsky, & Warner, 2010); freeing up cognitive resources for other things (Cuevas, Fiore, Caldwell, & Strater, 2007); scaffolds or artifacts can take different forms (Fore & Schooler, 2004).
  • Further related reading

Referenced in

@Seely2015