Research

Collaborative Work

Substitutes or Complements? Role Systems and Culture as Sources of Predictive Knowledge for Coordination

SocArXiv preprint, 2026

When culturally diverse workers must coordinate, the prevailing design prescription is structural: make roles predictable and couple them tightly, so that workers can anticipate one another from the role system rather than from a common background. Implicit in this prescription is that structural and cultural sources of anticipation are interchangeable. I argue that the substitution holds only for routine coordination, because structure and culture supply predictive knowledge of different kinds: role systems generate scripted anticipation, which sustains routine exchange, whereas a shared cultural background generates communicative anticipation: the common ground partners need to renegotiate coordination in real time. I test this argument with passing data from professional European soccer. Across roughly five million directed dyad-match observations, shared official language predicts higher pass rates between teammates, but the advantage concentrates in dyads whose roles are behaviorally unpredictable and loosely coupled, precisely where structure offers little anticipatory support. For coordination flexibility, the pattern reverses: behavioral predictability does not moderate the cultural advantage, and tight role coupling amplifies it. Structural and cultural anticipation thus substitute for routine exchange but complement each other for flexible variation. Organizations that pair culturally diverse workforces with rigid structures may run efficiently on routine tasks while remaining poorly equipped to adapt.

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Show Me the Meaning of Working Lonely: Conceptualising the Interrelation between Individual and Collaborative Work

Published in European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), 2022

Knowledge workers are increasingly working in multi-team contexts to solve complex business problems. While collaborative work is an indispensable mode of work in multi-team knowledge work, the complementary mode of individual work, i.e. working uninterrupted in solitude, is often overlooked. We aim to better understand individual work and its role within multi-team contexts. Based on a literature review of the office design and telework debates, we provide a detailed account of individual work. Taking this vantage point and putting the task structure centre stage, we conceptualise the interrelation between individual and collaborative work. Specifically, we develop the work types maturation, execution, and meta work to exemplify the bipartite interrelation by depicting their task-bound interplay and time-bound tension. Thereby, we offer a different perspective on ‘cooperative work’ and equip practitioners with a vocabulary to discern the role of and articulate the needed amount for individual work.

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Help Converts Newcomers, Not Veterans: Generalized Reciprocity and Platform Engagement on Stack Overflow

Published in Computers in Human Behavior, 2026

Whether people who receive help online go on to help others is an open question. Prior observational studies report mixed results, and designs that ignore prior user activity may overstate reciprocity. We develop a matched difference-in-differences survival analysis of over 21 million Stack Overflow questions, comparing users whose questions were answered with propensity-score-matched users whose questions were not. We don’t ask broadly whether reciprocity works in general, but locate the narrow conditions under which it effects user behavior. Users whose questions were answered helped others slightly more often (increment at answer arrival, hazard ratio [HR] = 1.049, 95% CI [1.044, 1.054]). The response depended on tenure: new users responded most (HR = 1.071 in the first week, 95% CI [1.056, 1.086]), while the longest-tenured users did not respond measurably. The tenure gradient is the most robust pattern we find. Timing mattered too, though far more fragilely: users answered within 30 to 60 min responded most strongly, while answers under 30 min show no elevation. Most of our data predate 2020, and the generalized reciprocity effect among new users does not survive a split at ChatGPT’s release, so these estimates reflect a pre-generative-AI baseline. We review gratitude, moral obligation, social expectation, and incentive displacement as possible psychological mechanisms but cannot measure them. On Stack Overflow, generalized reciprocity is less a general driver of cooperation than a recruitment channel for contributions from new users: designers gain most by getting newcomers’ questions answered.

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How do Reputation Systems Affect Commitment and Social Cohesion in Economic Exchange?

Published in Social Psychology Quarterly, 2024

With the rise of the platform economy, economic interaction increasingly takes place under the regime of online reputation systems, which reduce uncertainty by publicizing others’ past behavior. However, uncertainty is central to the development of stable and cohesive relationships. The fundamental concerns are that reputation systems render personal, stable relationships obsolete and erode social cohesion. Grounded in social exchange theory, we propose two mechanisms through which reputation systems reduce commitment and inhibit social cohesion. These hypotheses are tested in a lab experiment simulating economic exchange with and without reputation systems. Contrary to our theoretical expectations, we find that reputation systems slightly reduce interactions between strangers and do not inhibit the development of cohesive ties. Although reputation systems reduce the expressive value of cooperation, they offset this undesired effect by increasing cooperation. Alleviating concerns about the social ramifications of the platform economy, the relationship structure appears largely unaffected by the reputation system. We conclude that actors interpret acts of cooperation differently in the presence of a reputation system, and market participants develop relationships not for purely functional reasons but as emotion-based byproducts of economic exchange.