DHB: Investigating socialization of new members into self-organizing technology-supported distributed teams

Increasingly, organizational work is performed by distributed teams of interdependent knowledge workers. Such teams have many benefits, but geographic, organizational and social distance between members makes it difficult for team members to create the shared understandings and social structures necessary to be effective. These distances are particularly problematic for new members seeking to join the teams. But as yet, research and practitioner communities know little about the dynamics of socialization in distributed teams, which our literature review suggests are likely to be substantially different from those in others kinds of organizations. These dynamics are particularly challenging when teams have the autonomy or responsibility to self-organize (e.g., in teams that span multiple formal organizations). The goal of our study is to better understand the cognitive and social structures that underlie changes in individual and team behaviors in these teams as this mode of work is becoming increasingly more common. Our study addresses the general research question: What are the dynamics by which new members are socialized into self-organizing technology-supported distributed teams? To study the dynamics of self-organizing distributed teams, specifically new member socialization, we propose a multi-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary study that integrates the analysis of multiple sources of data using multiple research methods. We first review the literature on socialization i