Workplace, Teams, & Culture P. 7

A general assumption about innovation-oriented partnerships between companies is that success grows out of good relationships based on mutual trust, while poor cooperation and a lack of trust lead to disaster. Yet examples abound of high-trust partnerships that fail to innovate and of turbulent ones that succeed. Is trust in fact overrated? Is it sometimes an actual hindrance to innovation? Can we think in terms of an optimal level of trust -- not too little and not too much? Because case studies are not adequate for evaluating correlations between the level of trust and innovativeness -- it is impossible to disentangle trust from the many other contributing factors -- we set up a series of experiments, using pairs of individuals who already knew each other and who had sufficient prior experience together so as to have formed distinct trust perceptions. Results point to a major finding: As mutual trust increases, the partnership's creativity goes up, reaches a maximum point and then starts to decline. Similarly for innovativeness. As mutual trust increases, innovativeness also goes up -- but only to a certain point, after which innovativeness declines, even though it stays at higher levels because of greater commitment. We explain this seemingly strange pattern as follows: If a team enjoys a high level of trust and mutual caring, individuals might become too accommodating, quickly accepting their partners' ideas and thus reducing the amount of dynamic task-oriented conflict. The team might then have lower creative tension, consequently reducing the partnership's effectiveness. The bottom line: When inventing together, trust is good; but avoiding too much trust is better.

An interview with Thomas W. Malone, director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, by editor-in-chief Michael S. Hopkins. These new technologies are not just fancy technologies that let individual people do different things better or faster. These new technologies change the essence of organizations. An organization itself is really primarily a huge human-based machine for communicating information and making decisions. And these new technologies are all about communicating information and helping to make decisions. So, to a greater degree than any technologies since, for instance, those that enabled the Industrial Revolution, we’re now in the midst of a transformation in how businesses are organized that is enabled this time not by new kinds of production technology, but by new kinds of coordination technology.

A new book argues that companies need to adapt to a fundamental change in business.

User-generated content platforms, open source software, crowdsourcing and knowledge markets these are all possible only because of the "social web," the interlinked virtual universe that to so many executives seems to offer the irresistible promise of providing something--ideas, work, decisions--for (almost) nothing, if only they could manage it right. Managing it right means understanding that even though the new platforms are all about harnessing crowds and communities, in the end those crowds and communities are nothing but a sum of individuals. And your company's social web efforts will succeed only to the extent that you are able to attract good individuals, motivate them to perform good work, and empower them to get to know and trust one another enough to collaborate toward the end goals of the community. The question is, How do you do that? The answer: by capitalizing on the motivational power of in reputation--that is, by designing and building an online reputation system that triggers and nourishes the kind of web community that will serve your company's needs. Using examples such as Amazon, eBay, Epinions and Yelp, the author describes how design choices of a reputation system can profoundly affect a community's culture, making an otherwise collaborative and cordial community into a competitive and even combative space.

Large, loosely organized groups of people can work together electronically in surprisingly effective ways.

What it means when people who grew up with technology in their hands become the heart of a workforce--and what it means if managers don't understand them.

Andrew McAfee's new book looks at Enterprise 2.0 tools as a way to span organizational networks.

What role does reputation play in a R&;D worker's decision whether or not to share knowledge with a colleague? To study this question, the authors surveyed more than 200 scientists in 63 different pharmaceutical companies. The authors' findings suggest that, even among R&;D workers in the same company, information is not always shared freely. Instead, a potential knowledge source's assessment of a knowledge seeker's reputation affected whether or not information was offered. The authors found that a variety of factors affect scientists' assessment of a colleague's reputation. Not surprisingly, the duration of two parties' past interaction was positively related to the likelihood of current knowledge sharing occurring between them. Also, proximity influenced how positively reputations were perceived. But, if the person seeking information was already indebted to the potential knowledge source, knowledge sharing was less likely to occur. In addition, the study found that scientists are more likely to share information with a colleague in the same company if the know-how is unique and vital to accomplishing a task.

GM and Toyota launched their joint auto plant where GM's work force had been at its worst. Here's what happened next.

Despite the importance of innovation to a business's success, only recently have companies not only established internal environments conducive to innovation but also begun identifying, cultivating and taking advantage of a wide variety of external sources for innovation. Among such sources, suppliers are recognized as having especially large innovation potential because they know what the companies that is, their customers--are doing and need and also because mechanisms for knowledge transfer from supplier to customer are typically in place. However, while it is one thing for a mechanism to be available by which suppliers may transfer innovation to customers, it is quite another for the suppliers actually to do the transferring. The customer, the prime mover in building and maintaining the relationship, can move in two different ways to encourage the supplier to innovate to the customer's benefit. First, it should reduce or eliminate three kinds of problems: (1) conflicting objectives among the customer's functional areas, (2) excessive and often late engineering or specification changes and (3) price-reduction pressures on suppliers that consider only the customer's financial needs. Second and most importantly, the customer should initiate directly positive and trust-building activities.