Week8_Mani et al. (2014)_Aaron

Technology advances in distributed work lead to a growing phenomenon that increasing number of firms set up offshore captive centers (CCs) to carry out R&D work. In this context, Mani et al. (2014) studies how organizations coordinate distributed knowledge intensive work (e.g., R&D).

Prior literature has suggested two generic coordination mechanism, information sharing and modularization, but do not reach any conclusion about the superiority of one of these mechanisms for any given task. This study address such research gap by raising a question, what combinations of task characteristics and coordination mechanisms yield high performance in the context of interdependent knowledge work?

The authors analyzed survey data from 132 R&D CCs established by foreign multinational companies in India to understand how firms execute distributed innovative work. They found that 1) modularization of work across locations is largely ineffective when the underlying tasks are less routinized, less analyzable and less familiar to the CCs; and 2) information sharing across locations is effective when the CC performs tasks that are less familiar to it.

The primary contribution of this study is to demonstrate high performance work configurations in offshoring of R&D and product development work, given that the tasks analyzed are highly interdependent. Its results expand studies on organization and coordination of distributed work as well as for practitioners who want to improve the performance of their distributed R&D strategies. This study has following weakness: the cross-sectional analysis may limit its ability to establish causality, the measures are perceptual and the unobserved heterogeneities are not controlled.