Emergent Decision-Making Practices In Technology-Supported Self-Organizing Distributed Teams

We seek to identify work practices that make technology-supported, self-organizing, distributed (or virtual) teams (TSSODT for short) effective in producing outputs satisfactory to their sponsors, meeting the needs of their members, and continuing to function. A particularly important practice for team effectiveness is decision making: are the right decisions made at the right time to get the work done in a way that satisfies team sponsors, keeps contributors happy and engaged, and enables continued team success? In this research-in-progress paper, we report on an inductive qualitative analysis of 120 decision episodes taken by two Free/Libre Open Source Software development teams. Our analysis revealed differences in decision-making practices that seem to be related to differences in overall team effectiveness