Self-Organizing Teams in Online Work Settings

Understand

As the volume and complexity of distributed online work increases, the collaboration among people who have never worked together in the past is becoming increasingly necessary.

• Recent research has proposed algorithms to maximize the performance of such teams by grouping workers according to a set of predefined decision criteria.
• This approach micro-manages workers, who have no say in the team formation process.
• Depriving users of control over who they will work with stifles creativity, causes psychological discomfort and results in less-than-optimal collaboration results.