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Cocreating Understanding and Value in Distributed Work: How Members of Onsite and Offshore Information Systems Development Vendor Teams Give, Make, Demand and Break Sense

Paul W. L. Vlaar, Paul C. van Fenema, and Vinay Tiwari

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Abstract

Achieving shared, common, or mutual understandings among geographically dispersed workers is a central concern in the distributed work literature. Nonetheless, little is known yet about the socio-cognitive acts and communication processes involved with synchronizing and cocreating understandings in such settings. Building on a case study of a geographically distributed information systems development project at one of India’s largest offshore vendors, we postulate that knowledge and experience asymmetries—and requirements and task characteristics (such as complexity, instability, ambiguity, and novelty)—prompt onsite and offshore team members to engage in acts of sense-giving, sense-demanding, and sense-breaking. This allows them to make sense of their tasks and their environment, and it increases the likelihood that congruent and actionable understandings emerge. Furthermore, it assists them in cocreating novel understandings, especially when acts of sense-giving and sense-demanding are complemented with instances of sense-breaking. Our results contribute to the literature by explaining how distributed team members mitigate problems of understanding, transfer preexisting understandings, and cocreate novel understandings. Acts of sense-giving, sense-demanding, and sense-breaking allow distributed team members to jointly explore and generate value, thereby amplifying the performance of distributed workers.

Keywords:   Understanding, offshore, information systems development (ISD), social cognition, sense-giving, sense-making, sense-demanding, sense-breaking, value creation