The interacting effects of distributed work arrangements and individual dispositions on willingness to engage in sensemaking behaviors
Venue
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology (2015)
Publication Year
2015
Authors
Peter Gray, Brian Butler, Nikhil Sharma
BibTeX
Abstract
Faced with highly competitive and dynamic environments, organizations are
increasingly investing in technologies that provide them with new options for
structuring work. At the same time, firms are increasingly dependent on employees'
willingness and ability to make sense of novel tasks, problems, and rapidly
changing situations. Yet, in spite of its importance, the impact of
technology-enabled distributed work arrangements on sensemaking behavior is largely
unknown. Sensemaking remains something that is perceived by many to be an
idiosyncratic behavior that is, at best, loosely related to sociotechnical context
and culture. Drawing on previous studies of cognitive dispositions (need for
cognition, tendency for decisiveness, intolerance for ambiguity, and
close-mindedness) and research on how technology-enabled distributed work
arrangements affect interpersonal interaction, we theorize how workgroup geographic
distribution interacts with individual cognitive differences to affect employees'
willingness to engage in the core sociocognitive activities of sensemaking. Our
results show that the consequences of individual tendencies can vary under
different work arrangements, suggesting that managers seeking to facilitate
sensemaking activities must make careful choices about the composition of
distributed work groups, as well as how collaboration technologies can be used to
encourage sensemaking behaviors.
