The blind leading the blind. Impromptu leaderships influenced by awareness in collaborative search
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-08-2015-0125 |
| Date | 21 March 2016 |
| Pages | 212-226 |
| Published date | 21 March 2016 |
| Author | Chirag Shah |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval |
The blind leading the blind
Impromptu leaderships influenced by
awareness in collaborative search
Chirag Shah
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA
Abstract
Purpose –Online collaboration –a required method for many problem-solving situations in today’s
work environments –has many aspects that are not clearly understood or explored. One of them is how
work styles, specifically leadership styles, within a seemingly homogeneous teams with no prior role
assignments affects the process and outcomes of collaboration. The purpose of this paper is to
investigate the aspect of online collaboration to learn how different leadership styles that may emerge
impact collaborative work.
Design/methodology/approach –The work described here employs a user study involving
84 participants in 42 pairs, working in one of the three conditions across two sessions. The three
conditions are defined based on the amount and the kind of awareness provided to the team members:
no awareness of personal or team progress (C1), awareness of personal progress (C2), and awareness of
both personal and team progress (C3). The log and chat data from the sessions where these teams work
in collecting relevant information for two different topics are collected and analysed.
Findings –Quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate the difference among the three conditions with
respect to these two leadership styles. Specifically, itis found that those with the team awareness provided to
them (C3) exhibited the least amounts of leadership, keeping the team relatively symmetric. The democratic
nature of such teams also fostered more diverse searching behaviour and l ess need for communication.
Originality/value –The work reported here is a first attempt to shed light on two kinds of
connections: individual and team awareness to leadership style, and leadership style to diversity
of information exploration.
Keywords Leadership, Collaboration, Awareness, User study, Computer-mediated collaborative work,
Online search
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
Collaboration can be an important strategy, and sometimes even a necessity, for
solving complex problems (Denning, 2007). However, not all collaborations are
successful or effective. It would be useful to know which situations and what team
configurations could lead to successful collaboration. This is a highly involved
question to investigate, as it requires studying and connecting a number of different
dimensions of collaboration such as time and space (Twidale and Nichols, 1996),
various situations in which collaboration takes place such as education (Koschm ann
et al., 1992) and design (Olson et al., 1993), and the roles that the collaborators play
(Shah, Pickens and Golovchinsky, 2010). In the current paper, the focus is on a specific
aspect of collaborators’roles, namely leadership style. Specifically, the purpose is to
investigate if and what leadership styles emerge in a collaborative project without
pre-defined roles for the participants. It is also hoped that we may be able to see
the effect of the amount and type of information about the project available to the
participants to their leadership style.
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 68 No. 2, 2016
pp. 212-226
©Emerald Group Publishing Limited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-08-2015-0125
Received 8 August 2015
Revised 24 November 2015
Accepted 18 January 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
The author is thankful to Doulat Lakhani and Lori Shah for their contributions to coding the data
used for this work.
212
AJIM
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