Organizational Distance Also Matters: How Organizational Distance Among Industrial Research Teams Affect Their Research Productivity
This research addresses the problem of coordination and productivity for distributed teams in industrial research settings, though it is incremental as it extends prior work with a quantitative case study.
The study investigated how different types of distance affect the productivity of geographically distributed industrial research teams, finding that organizational and functional distances predict productivity, while geographic and time differences do not show significant statistical evidence.
Geographically distributed teams often face challenges in coordination and collaboration, lowering their productivity. Understanding the relationship between team dispersion and productivity is critical for supporting such teams. Extensive prior research has studied these relations in lab settings or using qualitative measures. This paper extends prior work by contributing an empirical case study in a real-world organization, using quantitative measures. We studied 117 new research project teams from the same discipline within an industrial research lab for 6 months. During this time, all teams shared one goal: submitting research papers to the same target conference. We analyzed these teams' dispersion-related characteristics as well as team productivity. Interestingly, we found little statistical evidence that geographic and time differences relate to team productivity. However, organizational and functional distances are predictive of the productivity of the dispersed teams we studied. We discuss the open research questions these findings revealed and their implications for future research.