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Coordination In Distributed Organizations, Kannan Srikanth

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Innovative work performed in a distributed fashion does not easily lend to itself either of two classic coordination strategies - anticipatory planning or ongoing rich communication. We study how innovative work that is distributed across space and time is coordinated in global software service organizations. Our findings indicate that neither coordination by plan nor coordination by feedback play a dominant role in the coordination of distributed software services delivery. Instead, we find that the firms we studied coordinate action distributed work by relying on common ground. Common ground leads to coordinated action across locations by two means: the anticipation effect …