Designing Effective Virtual Organizations as Sociotechnical Systems

Virtual organizations are increasingly pervasive in knowledge work, despite significant challenges with respect to support for common ground, member awareness, sense of community, work coupling, incentives, and other issues. Understanding how specific sociotechnical affordances of VOs can enhance effectiveness in new and distinctive ways will improve our understanding of virtual organizations, and of computer-mediated human activity. We analyze and synthesize relatively fragmented existing research to develop a schematic success model for virtual organization effectiveness. We suggest that this research could progress through developing and validating a pattern language for virtual organizations, which we illustrate, drawing from ongoing fieldwork.