Organizational Distance Also Matters: How Organizational Distance Among Industrial Research Teams Affect Their Research Productivity

TL;DR

This study investigates how organizational and functional distances among geographically distributed industrial research teams influence their research productivity, revealing that these distances are significant predictors while geographic dispersion is not.

Contribution

It provides the first empirical quantitative analysis of organizational distance effects on research team productivity in a real-world industrial setting.

Findings

Organizational and functional distances predict team productivity.

Geographic and time dispersion show little impact on productivity.

Study based on 117 research teams over 6 months.

Abstract

Geographically distributed teams often face challenges in coordination and collaboration, lowering their productivity. Understanding the relationship between team dispersion and productivity is critical for supporting such teams. Extensive prior research has studied these relations in lab settings or using qualitative measures. This paper extends prior work by contributing an empirical case study in a real-world organization, using quantitative measures. We studied 117 new research project teams from the same discipline within an industrial research lab for 6 months. During this time, all teams shared one goal: submitting research papers to the same target conference. We analyzed these teams' dispersion-related characteristics as well as team productivity. Interestingly, we found little statistical evidence that geographic and time differences relate to team productivity. However, organizational and functional distances are predictive of the productivity of the dispersed teams we studied. We discuss the open research questions these findings revealed and their implications for future research.