Roles of Culture for Knowledge Sharing in Asian Virtual Teams: A Case Study

2.1 Structure Theory

Giddens’ structure theory focuses the study of communities from an institutional perspective albeit without particular attention to IT (Giddens, 1979). AST provides a “model that describes the interplay between advanced information technologies, social structures, and human interaction” (Desanctis & Poole, 1994). DeSanctis and Poole posit that socio-technical outcomes are based on the social interaction derived from the combination of four sources of structure: technology (features & “spirit”), task (task knowledge or rules), organizational environment (social knowledge or rules of action), and the group’s internal system (e.g., styles of interacting) (Desanctis & Poole, 1994). These four sources of structure interact to create boundaries around teams, and the incentives and disincentives for developing relationships with team members.

Manzevski and Chudoba (2000) classified AST constructs especially suitable for virtual team study. They go on to study three global virtual teams and draw a number of observations positively supporting aspects of AST. They recognized global virtual team dynamics as a series of interaction incidents with emergent patterns supporting (when effective) a relatively limited number of structures. In this sense their work is consistent with the perspective of Gersick (1988; Gersick, 1989) who noted a punctuated equilibrium nature of team interactions in face-to-face teams. Manzevski and Chudoba (2000) conclude that “within interaction incidents the medium and form are selected to match the function, but across incidents over time, the function is modified to match the medium and form.” This dynamic as also been noted by Rutkowski et al. (Rutkowski, Vogel, Bemelmans et al., 2002; Rutkowski, Vogel, Genuchten et al., 2002).

DeSanctis and Poole (1994) proposed that organizational actors should be able to manage AST’s “mutual influence of technology and social processes” such that certain outcomes are more likely to result than if the systems were allowed to evolve on their own. This sets the base for proactive structure through management intervention in the context of knowledge management. Griffth (2003) suggest technology and organizational practices in ways likely to create better knowledge flow acting as a “trigger” for adaptive structure. Griffith et al. (2007) note that organizational practices and technology tools can be used to adjust the situation such that knowledge capabilities can be increased in high tech environments.