[AISWorld] Call for Submissions: HICSS Mini-track on Virtual Collaboration in Organizations and Networks (VCON’s) Minitrack

[Alberto Espinosa]

HICSS Call for Submissions: Virtual Collaboration in Organizations and Networks (VCON’s) Mini-track

While geographically distributed collaboration has been the subject of academic research for decades, the entire world coping with the global COVID-19 pandemic and its variants has accelerated interest in this critically important area of research and practice. Over the past few years, many organizations and networks have experienced a substantial increase in the depth and breadth of remote work, and hybrid and technology-mediated collaboration. The pandemic has substantially altered organizational practices of employees, contractors, and network members who collaborate across multiple spatial, temporal, and digital boundaries in complex configurations. These distributed collaborations are often comprised of multi-team systems, complex dependency relationships, and organizational boundaries. Coordinating task work and teamwork over a web of communication, information sharing, and knowledge relationships continues to serve as an important locus for research opportunities. In addition, the pandemic has altered and intensified practices of telework, remote education, online shopping, virtual conferences, distributed social events, and many other unique adaptations to this historic period, including future predictions of an increasing amount of hybrid work – which combines remote and onsite work, with different blends of synchronous and asynchronous work. The implications are profound from every perspective – including, economic, environmental, social, efficiencies. Research on virtual teams, distributed collaboration, telework, hybrid work, organizations and networks of relationships is necessarily multi-disciplinary to address the key challenges collaborators face, while accounting for the complex context in which such collaborations occur. Thus, we encourage submissions that may inform practice and research in distributed collaboration and telework through a variety of academic lenses and research that highlight methodological issues and innovation in the study of virtual teams, organizations, and networks. This minitrack invites papers that offer direct and indirect insights into the operation of virtual teams, distributed collaboration, telework and hybrid work, organizations, and networks, including research in the vein of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), computer supported collaborative learning (CSCW), human computer interaction (HCI), and social, organizational and knowledge networks. The topics for this minitrack include but are not limited to:

Topics for papers submitted to this minitrack include, but are not limited to:

·      Spatial and temporal separation and its effects on collaboration

·      Coordination and dependency networks in collaboration across multiple boundaries

·      Team knowledge networks quantitative and visual analysis

·      Impacts and consequences of telework and hybrid work on organizational and network outcomes

·      Team dynamics and distributed leadership in hybrid work

·      Cultural differences in perception of time

·      Conflict management across cultures

·      Project management styles and differences across cultures

·      Differences in language understanding and its effects on collaboration

·      Power distance and its effects on collaboration

·      Uncertainty (risk) avoidance and its effects on collaboration

·      Anonymity in multicultural teams

·      eLeadership and trust

·      Deception in virtual teams

·      Multi-team systems

·      Social loafing in virtual teams

·      Personality and its role in telework or virtual teams

·      Cross-cultural training

·      Virtual team collaboration, emotion, information sharing, innovation and relationship building

·      Identifying multi-level influences on virtual teams, organizations, and networks

·      Scientific collaboration in virtual teams (Team Science)

·      Collaboration and communication processes and tools

·      Differences between academic and non-academic virtual teams

·      Social network theory, analysis, methodological advances and graph analytics
We encourage research submissions that inform policy and practice, and offer insights into the successful operation of virtual collaboration in organizations and networks through a variety of academic lenses, including research in computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL), groups, teams, and social and organizational networks.

Key Deadlines:

June 15 - Papers due
August 17 - Notification of acceptance/rejection
September 4 - Deadline for authors whose papers are conditionally accepted to submit a revised manuscript
September 22 - Deadline for authors to submit final Manuscript for publication

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Derrick L. Cogburn, American University, dcogburn at american.edu<mailto:dcogburn at american.edu>
J. Alberto Espinosa, American University, alberto at american.edu<mailto:alberto at american.edu>
Mark Clark, American University, maclark at american.edu<mailto:maclark at american.edu>
Emma Nordback, Hanken School of Economics, emma.nordback at hanken.fi<mailto:emma.nordback at hanken.fi>