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In distributed organizations, perceived status differences between workers are ubiquitous and harmful. Yet research suggests that once they are formed, status beliefs in organizations become entrenched in hierarchies and are hard to dismantle. In an inductive qualitative study, we observed how established status differences between remote and in-person workers in distributed organizations dissolved during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic when everyone began working remotely. We use these data to theorize a novel status-equalizing process through which remote workers came to see themselves on an “equal playing field” with their in-person peers. We theorize how this status equalizing occurred through workers’ changing their “in-person default” use of technology—that is, their new behavior challenged embedded cultural practices that had treated the in-person workplace experience as the standard, normal, and valued perspective, implicitly guiding how employees used technology. Workers adopted new and more inclusive technology practices—including the use of asynchronous communication, greater codification of work, and virtual socializing—which resulted in remote workers perceiving new and more equal communication standards, access to information, and opportunity for social connection. As a result, these workers reported feeling less negatively stereotyped and treated more fairly in their virtual interactions with colleagues, fostering feelings of inclusion and deepening relationships across the previously established status divide. At a time when many organizations are grappling with the challenges of distributed, remote, and hybrid work, our research illuminates how inclusive technology practices can help nullify entrenched status imbalances. 

How does cognitive diversity in a group affect its performance? Prior research suggests that group cognitive diversity poses a performance tradeoff: Diverse groups excel at creativity and innovation, but struggle to take coordinated action. Building on the insight that group cognition is not static, but is instead dynamically and interactively produced, we introduce the construct of discursive diversity, a manifestation of group cognitive diversity, which reflects the degree to which the meanings conveyed by group members in a given set of interactions diverge from one another. We propose that high-performing teams are ones that have a collective capacity to modulate shared cognition to match changing task requirements: They exhibit higher discursive diversity when engaged in ideational tasks and lower discursive diversity when performing coordination tasks. We further argue that teams exhibiting congruent modulation—that is, those with low group-level variance in members’ within-person semantic shifts to changing task requirements—are more likely to experience success than teams characterized by incongruent modulation. Using the tools of computational linguistics to derive a measure of discursive diversity and drawing on a novel longitudinal data set of intragroup electronic communications and performance outcomes for 117 remote software development teams on an online platform ( www.gigster.com ), we find support for our theory. Our findings suggest that the performance tradeoff of group cognitive diversity is not inescapable: Groups can navigate it by aligning their levels of discursive diversity to match their task requirements and by having members stay aligned with one another as they make these adjustments. This paper was accepted by Isabel Fernandez-Mateo, organizations. Funding: Financial support from the NSF-CAREER [Grant 1847091] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: Data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2021.4274 . 

By identifying the socio-technical conditions required for teams to work effectively remotely, the Distance Matters framework has been influential in CSCW since its introduction in 2000. Advances in collaboration technology and practices have since brought teams increasingly closer to achieving these conditions. This paper presents a ten-month ethnography in a remote organization, where we observed that despite exhibiting excellent remote collaboration, teams paradoxically struggled to collaborate across team boundaries. We extend the Distance Matters framework to account for inter-team collaboration, arguing that challenges analogous to those in the original intra-team framework --- common ground, collaboration readiness, collaboration technology readiness, and coupling of work --- persist but are actualized differently at the inter-team scale. Finally, we identify a fundamental tension between the intra- and inter-team layers: the collaboration technology and practices that help individual teams thrive (e.g., adopting customized collaboration software) can also prompt collaboration challenges in the inter-team layer, and conversely the technology and practices that facilitate inter-team collaboration (e.g., strong centralized IT organizations) can harm practices at the intra-team layer. The addition of the inter-team layer to the Distance Matters framework opens new opportunities for CSCW, where balancing the tension between team and organizational collaboration needs will be a critical technological, operational, and organizational challenge for remote work in the coming decades. 

This paper develops a new understanding about how “client managers”—those using platform labor markets to hire and manage workers—attempt to maintain control when managing skilled contractors. We conducted an inductive field study analyzing interactions between client managers and contractors in software development “gigs” mediated by a platform labor market. The platform provided multiple tools client managers could use for control, including in response to unexpected events. We found that, when managers used the tools to exert coercive control over contractors acting unexpectedly, it backfired and contributed to uncompleted project outcomes. In contrast, when they refrained from using the tools for coercive control in such circumstances and instead engaged in what we call collaborative repair, their actions contributed to completed project outcomes. Collaborative repair refers to interactions that surface misaligned interpretations of a situation and help parties negotiate new, reciprocal expectations that restore trust and willingness to continue an exchange. Client managers’ attempts at collaborative repair yielded fuller understanding of project-related breakdowns and shared investment in new expectations, facilitating effective control and completed projects. This study extends prior theories of control by characterizing the new client manager role created by platforms and demonstrating how initiating repair is integral for managers’ capacity to accomplish control in these comparatively brittle work relationships. 

Team structures---roles, norms, and interaction patterns---define how teams work. HCI researchers have theorized ideal team structures and built systems nudging teams towards them, such as those increasing turn-taking, deliberation, and knowledge distribution. However, organizational behavior research argues against the existence of universally ideal structures. Teams are diverse and excel under different structures: while one team might flourish under hierarchical leadership and a critical culture, another will flounder. In this paper, we present DreamTeam: a system that explores a large space of possible team structures to identify effective structures for each team based on observable feedback. To avoid overwhelming teams with too many changes, DreamTeam introduces multi-armed bandits with temporal constraints: an algorithm that manages the timing of exploration--exploitation trade-offs across multiple bandits simultaneously. A field experiment demonstrated that DreamTeam teams outperformed self-managing teams by 38%, manager-led teams by 46%, and teams with unconstrained bandits by 41%. This research advances computation as a powerful partner in establishing effective teamwork.