Based on a study of knowledge transfer within more than 15 industries, across three forms of governance, and between both domestic and international R&D partners, knowledge transfer success was found to be associated with several key variables, and to hinge upon (a) both R&D units’ understanding where the desired knowledge resides within the source, (b) the extent to which the parties share similar knowledge bases, and the extent of interactions between the source and the recipient to (c) transfer the knowledge and (d) participate in an articulation process through which the source’s knowledge is made accessible to the recipient.

This article presents Second Messenger, a system of dynamic awareness displays that reveal speaker participation patterns in a face-to-face discussion. The system has been used by a variety of groups during face-to-face meetings, increasing individuals ’ awareness of their own and others ’ participation in discussions. Experimental results indicate that these displays influence the amount an individual participates in a discussion and the process of information sharing used during a decision-making task. These findings suggest that awareness applications bring about systematic changes in group communication styles, highlighting the potential for such applications to be designed to improve group interactions. Joan DiMicco is an HCI researcher interested in human–human communication; she is a researcher at IBM Research in Cambridge, MA. Katherine Hollenbach is an undergraduate at MIT with an interest in computer science and design; she is an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab. Anna

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: We thank the senior editor on the manuscript, V. Sambamurthy, and the anonymous associate editor and reviewers for their many insightful suggestions on earlier

In our empirical study of a small geographically-dispersed software development team, we examine the role and importance of communication norms in facilitating effective distributed coordination. Our longitudinal investigation of the ongoing communication engaged in by team members within multiple media highlights the creation and emergence of a number of key norms that were critical to helping the team get its distributed work done. Please do not cite or distribute without permission 1 Acknowledgments: We would like to thank the members of Little Company (LC) who generously provided the data and their time for this study. Special thanks also to Stephanie Woerner for her extensive research support on

Coordination games have multiple Nash equilibria (i.e., sets of strategies which are best responses to one another). In ``weak-link " coordination games players choose a number 1-7. Their payoff is increasing in the minimum number (or weakest link) and decreasing in the difference between their number and the minimum. Choosing 7 is an ``efficient " equilibrium because it gives everybody a higher payoff than any other coordinated choice. Higher-payoff equilibria are riskier, however, so the game expresses the tradeoff between group efficiency and personal risk present in many social and organizational settings. We tested whether choosing efficiently in a weak-link game increases cooperative play in a subsequent prisoner's dilemma (PD) game. This cross-game transfer resembles transfer of cooperative norms in small firms (which are more like coordination games than PDs) as firms grow larger and become like PDs. In two experiments, if a group of players share a history of playing the weak-link game efficiently, that efficiency precedent can transfer to a subsequent PD game, improving the level of cooperativeness. The effect of transfer is much larger in magnitude (increasing cooperation from 15-30 % to 71%) than the effects of most variables in previous PD studies. However, the transfer effect depends on descriptive similarity of strategies in the two games, since it largely disappears when the strategies are numbered differently in the weak-link game and the PD.

Few interpersonal relationships endure without one party violating the other’s expectations. Thus, the ability to build trust and to restore cooperation after a breach can be critical for the preservation of positive relationships. Using an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, this article presents two experiments that investigated the effects of the timing of a trust breach—at the start of an interaction, after 5 trials, after 10 trials, or not at all. The findings indicate that getting off on the wrong foot has devastating long-term consequences. Although later breaches seemed to limit cooperation for only a short time, they still planted a seed of distrust that surfaced in the end. Keywords: trust; trust repair; trust breach; cooperation;

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We employ a sensemaking lens to study economic transactions at the micro level, investigating how social distance affects the logic of exchange. In transcripts of 87 two-party negotiations, we find that most pairs quickly coordinate on a shared logic of exchange and improvise in accord with its implied rules throughout their interaction. Negotiators turn to three dynamic processes— trust-testing, process clarification, and emotional punctuation—when they have difficulty moving the interaction toward a coherent, mutually agreed upon improvisation. The improvisations take the form of openness, mutual gain, or haggling, and mediate the effects of social distance on economic outcomes.

Existing research and theory on groups and teams is built on the underlying assumption that the members of teams agree as to who are and who are not their teammates. In a study of 43 software development teams in a large multinational software company, I question this assumption and provide a first examination of the phenomenon of intra-team boundary disagreement and the mechanisms underlying it. I use a web-based survey and semi-structured interviews to identify both antecedents and effects of boundary disagreement. I find evidence that patterns of interdependence and workflow act as antecedents of boundary disagreement, while contrary to my hypotheses, no significant relationship existed between communication patterns and boundary disagreement. I also provide evidence that teams experiencing boundary disagreement perform significantly lower than those without – a relationship mediated by transactive memory, shared team identity, and affective conflict.

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