Antecedents Of Implicit Coordination Of Innovative Collaborative Learning Team In The Context Of Social Media:An Empirical Study

More and more organizations regard team as the basic working unit,and adopt the collaboration of several teams to complete a project innovatively.Meanwhile,at the era of Enterprise 2.0,social media as a popular collaborative technology has been widely applied to the collaboration of this innovative team.It facilitates interactions between members;however,it also places team in a virtual environment.Therefore,how to coordinate interdependencies among members and effectively use resources to make the project operate orderly becomes the focus of project management.In order to coordinate this complex and flexible innovative team,prior studies claimed that it is less feasible to rely on explicit coordination manners merely,such as plans and meetings.While implicit coordination that is based on anticipation and dynamic adjustment is believed to be more effective.Therefore,it is significant to study how to improve the effectiveness of implicit coordination in the context of social media.From two points of view,that is,the factors that influence implicit coordination mostly —technology and interpersonal factors,and the coordination levels — inner-team and inter-team,the current studies mainly focus on the inner-team implicit coordination from the perspective of interpersonal factors.However,in the context of social media,what the impacts that technology will have on implicit coordination? What’s more,the scope of project cooperation is no longer confined to the team,then how will the inter-team implicit coordination be influenced by interpersonal factors?In order to answer these questions,we conducted two sub-studies to research the relationship between social media activities use and inner-team implicit coordination,and the relationship between interpersonal factors and inter-team implicit coordination,respectively.In addition,we conducted this study through field study by designing a business analysis course that involves 178 graduate students.We collected data of 40 teams and data of 82 inter-team pairs through network questionnaire and match-pair survey,respectively.The study find that,at the team level,the use of the two kinds of social media functions—information processing and social connection can significantly improve the level of implicit coordination.And implicit coordination level can also be improved by explicit coordination mechanism.In addition,at the inter-team level,shared mental model of project can effectively increase the accuracy of anticipation between inter-team members.The effectiveness of inter-team dynamic adjust-ment can be promoted by one dimension of guanxi.In addition,the results show that there exists significant positive relationship between the two components of implicit coordination—anticipation and dynamic adjustment at the inter-team level.The results are discussed in detail,some possible theoretical and practical contributions are put forward specifically,and finally,limitations and future directions of this study are also demonstrated in this paper.