CONSIDERACIONES SOBRE EL PLAN PEDAGÓGICO DE ESTE DISEÑO CURRICULAR

In this chapter I have introduced the two industrial partners, whose collaboration is the focus of attention in my ethnographic case study. I have briefly outlined the history of the two companies and their position in the market. I have also touched upon the notion of trust through transparency as formulated by the former CEO of HCL, Vineet Nayar; I have described the outsourcing journey that Berlingske Media started in 2007, and I have briefly sketched the office-layout in Copenhagen and in Denmark.

Arguably, technologies available and the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is an integral part of global collaboration. However, it is also a subject I have not devoted much attention to in this chapter, as this is the main topic of Chapter V: ‘Challenged by Distance’, where I focus on communication and collaboration across distance using ICT.

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Introduction

One of the many manifestations of globalization is the increasing tendency for western firms to strategically outsource activities to Asia (Windrum et al., 2009) and throughout the last two decades it has become increasingly popular to engage in offshore outsourcing (Contractor et al., 2010) of IT activities, which the empirical foundation for this dissertation is yet another instance of.

Success in such endeavors dependent significantly on the participants’ abilities to work in distributed teams; and a large body of research within several academic fields has been devoted to understanding the inherent complexities of distributed teamwork (see for instance Olson & Olson, 2000; Hambley et al., 2007). Much of this research mentions the importance of trust in virtual teamwork, but without making much of it.

On the other hand, there exists a large body of research on trust (Saunders et al., 2010) but within trust research only limited attention has been devoted to virtual collaboration.

In traditional collocated work-environment we easily get to know each other. We eat lunch together; share personal details about our family, interests, vacation; gather for social activities after hours and so on. By simply being collocated we are bound to pick up a lot of contextual knowledge: We know who is present and when they arrived. We know when they leave and we get an impression of whether they are hard working or more easy going. Do they take long lunch breaks or are they grabbing a sandwich at their desks? How many are they talking to over the course of the day? And who?

Moreover, we gain insights into our colleagues’ moods and we can relatively easy spot if they are happy, angry, sad, tired, stressed out, overworked and so on.

There is an almost endless list of things we can pick up from simply being collocated.

All this contextual knowledge happens automatically and for the most part unconsciously. All we need to do is be there. This concept of ”just being around” is referred to as passive face time by Elsbach et al. (2010).

Kimberly Elsbach and her colleagues (2010) conclude that by just being around we tend to spontaneously and unconsciously draw positive conclusions about the character of our colleagues: We assign personal traits such as reliability, dedication, accountability merely based on co-presence. Elsbach et al. (2010) furthermore demonstrate that employees that are not physically present miss out on promotions and salary increases, due to the lack of these spontaneous, positive conclusions. Thus, being the virtual colleague can be quite challenging with regards to establishing a positive impression of one self and the work one performs and additionally damaging to one’s career. In a similar vein Hinds & Bailey (2003) conclude: “When trust is missing, team members are more likely to question others’ intentions and make attributions that do not adequately account for situational factors” (p. 618) as lack of close proximity is a hindrance to establishment of shared context, familiarity, friendship and homogeneity among the actors.

From quite a different branch of literature the former CEO and Chairman of General Electric Jack Welch assesses that the one’s that will be promoted into leadership roles are the ones that are consistently seen and measured as this creates familiarity and trust. Not because they are “stars during every ‘crucible’ moment at the office” (Welch

& Welch, 2007: 92) but rather because they are “present and accounted for. And their presence says: Work is my top priority. I’m committed to this company. I want to lead.

And I can” (ibid.) – it appears that the complexities of geographical distribution and its influence on trust is also acknowledged by managerial practitioners.

Thus, it seems that distance indeed matters, as Olson & Olson (2000) concluded in their widely cited article from 2000. However, much has happened since Olson &

Olson did their empirical studies some fifteen years ago. Communication technology has developed and matured drastically and Olson & Olson (2000) were definitely right when assessing the future of collaboration technologies: “Good design and more horsepower in the infrastructure will solve a number of the limitations of current distance technologies. Greater bandwidth will solve the disruptive influence of today’s delays in audio and video transmission. Greater bandwidth will allow for larger, smoother, more life-size displays of remote workers, making their interaction more similar to the flow of proximal interaction” (Olson & Olson, 2000: 143). Today, we have high-quality video meetings with unnoticeable lack, cutting clear and undisrupted audio where groups of people can interact from different location at our disposal. We have video-enabled chat services such as Skype, Microsoft Lync and IBM Sametime.

We have a broad variety of web-conferencing software available and it is safe to say that Olson & Olson’s (2000) projection that “advances in technology suggest that with careful human factors in design, there may be technical ways to come closer to some aspects of the face-to-face work” (Olson & Olson, 2000: 143) has come true.

But even though the technical achievements over the past fifteen years are impressive does that mean that it has become easy to collaborate across distance? A vast body of literature (see Berry (2011) for an elaborate review) suggests that technological advancement in it self does not guarantee smooth, frictionless collaboration. Rather, we should – as Ceci & Prencipe (2013) suggest – focus on how we collaborate. That is, we need to pay attention to how do we organize virtual teamwork. Ceci & Prencipe (2013) identify two generic approaches, namely to “(a) decompose activities through the definition of standard and stable interfaces among its components to reduce interdependencies; (b) create opportunity for ongoing communication for actors involved in the pursuit of interdependent activities” (Ceci & Prencipe, 2013: 326).

However, as Brusoni et al. (2001) point out, perfect decomposability requires perfect understanding of all interdependencies, which is a rare case. Consequently, actors have

to communicate when collaborating in virtual teams in order to succeed in performing the tasks they are set out to do, which, as emphasized by Hinds & Bailey (2003), is a challenge in distributed teams.

In this chapter I will investigate what the perceived challenges of distributed work are seen from the perspectives of the actors in the client organization as well as the vendor organization. Subsequently, I will enquire into how trustworthiness is established in the collaboration between the actors from the two organizational entities, characterized, for the most part, by physical distance.

Thus, in this chapter I seek to answer the two questions below:

• What are the perceived challenges of globally distributed collaboration?

• How does distance influence the actors’ perceptions of their inter-organizational counterpart’s trustworthiness?

In terms of theory, this chapter will draw on the theoretical framework developed in

‘Chapter II: Theory on Trust’. Consequently, trust is conceptualized as “a psychological state comprising the intention to accept vulnerability based upon positive expectations of the intentions or behavior of another” (Rousseau et al., 1998:

395). Moreover, “trust in everyday life is a mix of feeling and rational thinking”

(Möllering, 2006: 44). Thus, trust has a cognitive and an affective dimension and trust is based on assessments of the trustee’s trustworthiness –on assessments of their ability, integrity and benevolence (Möllering, 2006), where ability and integrity relates to the cognitive dimension of trust, and benevolence relates to the affective dimension of trust.

In addition to answering the two above-mentioned research questions I will – based on the empirical findings and the theoretical framework – discuss whether there are unexploited opportunities for advancing trustful relations between the actors from the

two different organizational entities by engaging the concept of active trust (Möllering, 2006).

The progression of this chapter is four-fold: First, to describe the availability and utilization of technology and thus elaborate the empirical description provided in

‘Chapter IV: ‘Setting the Scene’ however, with a specific focus on the role of technology; second, to understand the perceived value of co-location; third, to understanding the perceived challenges of geographically distributed collaboration as perceived by the actors; and fourth, to discuss the possibility to advance trust in the concrete empirical setting. Furthermore, by describing the technologies available and how the actors engage in using technology and by developing an understanding of these challenges this chapter also establishes a foundation that will be used in the subsequent chapters, where I engage in interdisciplinary analysis of trust and control;

trust and culture; and trust and boundaries, respectively.