On the effects of authority on peer motivation: Learning from Wikipedia

Abstract

Research Summary: We investigate the conditions under which authority can be deployed without reducing subordinate motivation. We show that lateral authority, the legitimacy to resolve task‐specific problems, is welcomed by members of an organization in the resolution of coordination conflicts, the more so (a) the fiercer the conflict to be resolved, (b) the higher the competence‐based status of the authority, (c) the lower the tenure of, and (d) the more focused the organizational members are. Analyzing the discussion behavior of members of Wikipedia between 2002 and 2014, we corroborate our allegations empirically by analyzing 642,916 article–discussion pages. Our findings, obtained for a modern collective production community, provide learning opportunities for how traditional organizations may want to govern activities of their idiosyncratically motivated staff. Managerial Summary: When managers use their (legitimate) power to take decisions on behalf of their staff, they risk setting back employees and making them detach from the firm. This danger is particularly salient whenever highly motivated teams of staff autonomously work on corporate problems and are used to governing themselves. Examples range from skunkwork initiatives within traditional firms to entire team‐based organizations, such as Valve or Zappos. When and how managers can add value by resolving conflicts within and across these teams once their self‐organization fails is what we study in this article. Inspired by data from Wikipedia, we suggest that managers should not intervene prematurely, benefit from visible competence, and are respected most for their actions by specialized peers who recently joined the organization.

What Is Different About Digital Strategy? From Quantitative to Qualitative Change

“…In these communities, remotely located individuals are able to collaborate using digital technology that enables coordination through global visibility of coding work in progress as well as tools for managing dependencies and communication among contributors. Scholars have shown that in certain domains of the software industry, this form of organizing-an unambiguous offspring of the connectivity enabled by digitizationenables the aggregation of efforts from numerous contributors and provides credible alternatives to what for-profit firms do (e.g., Greenstein andZhu 2018, Klapper andReitzig 2018). The possibility of purely algorithmic solutions to the universal problems of organizing-for example, division of labor and integration of effort-appears to be at the verge of realization in these systems (Puranam et al 2014).…”

Resolving governance disputes in communities: A study of software license decisions

“…Despite its limitations, our study contributes to the literature on community governance in general and dispute resolution in online communities in particular. It extends the understanding of dispute resolution in online communities from an operational one (Forte et al, 2009;Klapper & Reitzig, 2018) to a more strategic one. Our theory explains otherwise puzzling observations about OSS communities, such as the rare occurrence of governance disputes and the positive association between discussion group size and resolution.…”

“…Initiator characteristics Whether the initiator of the discussion was a project owner or not, and the amount of source code contributed by the initiator (contribution), could shape the amount of attention and support she receives from other participants. From prior research on operational disputes in online communities, we believe these variables may signify the competence-based status of the initiator (Dahlander & O'Mahony, 2011;Klapper & Reitzig, 2018). We obtained relevant information on the initiator's characteristics from the GitHub interface.…”

“…An emerging stream of literature has taken on this challenge and has examined operational disputes on (editing) tasks in the Wikipedia online community (Forte et al, 2009; Kittur, Suh, Pendleton, & Chi, 2007; Klapper & Reitzig, 2018; Piskorski & Gorbatâi, 2017). Collectively, these studies point to two surprising aspects.…”

“…This study is the first to document the resolution mechanisms in governance disputes on license decisions, and thus provides a complement to the growing literature on operational disputes in online communities (Forte, Larco, & Bruckman, 2009;Klapper & Reitzig, 2018). Its insights help to understand resolution of not only disputes of strategic and economic importance (i.e., how to manage intellectual property and appropriate value) to online communities in particular (Lerner & Schankerman, 2010) but also disputes of existential significance (i.e., how to establish fundamental governance principles) to communities in general (Dietz et al, 2003;Ostrom, 1990).…”