Elisa Mattarelli

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor (Associate) at San Jose State University

This article systematically reviews the literature on online task crowdwork to investigate the complex relationship between technology and work design on crowdwork platforms. We highlight the diverse interpretations and uses of technology, specifically platform features and algorithms, in relation to work design. Our review reveals that platform fe...

While the literature on gig work is expanding rapidly, many are the issues that need to be answered in order to fully understand the lived experiences of gig workers and illuminate the dynamics of gig work. Despite it is widely recognized that gig workers constitute an heterogenous workforce, for instance, seminal works have focused on finding simi...

Studies on corporate social performance advocate that interrelated yet conflicting goals, such as sustainability and profitability, give rise to specific dynamics and inherent tensions, and call for more research to investigate how the duality of goals is managed by specific individuals in organizations. Through a micro-foundational view of ambidex...

In this study, we advance the literature on ambidexterity by investigating how employees interpret and react to a multinational organization’s overarching strategic mandate to become ambidextrous. Our grounded model, based on qualitative data collected from 78 employees and managers in a multinational corporation, reveals that individuals vary in t...

On online labour platforms, algorithmic scores are used as indicators of freelancers' work quality and future performance. Recent studies underscore that, to achieve good scores and secure their presence on platforms, freelancers respond to algorithmic control in different ways. However, we argue, to fully understand how freelancers deal with algor...

Purpose This paper investigates how (1) a work environment designed to sustain creativity (i.e. through flexible arrangements and elements of the social-organizational work environment) and (2) the amount of enacted work interactions among employees, interpreted as facilitators of new idea generation (i.e. outdegree centrality in instrumental netwo...

The use of Agile practices is typically associated to a wide array of benefits for organizations. This paper extends growing research on the ‘dark’ side of Agile by investigating the depletion of innovation in a large telco company following the large-scale implementation of Agile in R&D units. Our qualitative study reveals a shift in the organizat...

For over a decade, firms have built crowd-based open innovation and co-design platforms to improve and customize their products through widened participation in the design process. However, only a fraction of these platforms remain active sources of innovation today. While benefits of involving people from outside the firm as co-designers have been...

The investigation of the appealing indication that a modular product architecture is best associated to a loosely coupled organizational structure—that is, the mirroring hypothesis—has produced contradictory evidence, especially in the dynamic and ambiguous context of new product development. By integrating modularity theory and product-representat...

This paper unpacks creative processes in collaborative spaces (CS). We focus on how the positive resources related to wellbeing and work-life balance derived from working in CS interplay with the use of collaborative technology in affecting individual creativity. We conducted a survey study with individuals working in 27 different CS in Italy. We p...

Prototypes play a powerful role in facilitating the work of multidisciplinary innovation teams, but if not properly managed, they may inhibit innovation processes. This paper inquires into the tensions that exist around the use of prototypes in multidisciplinary teams. We studied the relationship between work identities (related to teams and subgro...

Purpose This study investigates the role of collaborative spaces as organizational support for internal innovation through cross-functional teams and for open innovation with external stakeholders. In particular, the study focuses on collaborative spaces as tools for multiplex (i.e., simultaneous internal and external boundary management in innovat...

Purpose. This study explores how the process of work identity construction unfolds for gig workers experiencing unstable working relationships in online labor markets. In particular, it investigates how digital platforms, intended both as providers of technological features and online environments, affect this process. Design. We conducted an explo...

Groundde model of swift identity formation in interorganizational partnerships

We investigate how collective identity formation processes interplay with collaboration practices in an inter-organizational partnership promoting regional innovation. We found that initial collaboration challenges are dealt with by setting up an early “swift identity” which is associated with material artifacts to increase its strength and stabili...

Crowd-based open innovation communities have received increasing attention, based on the premise that leveraging the power and diversity of the crowd can lead to innovative outcomes. However, we still know little about how work is coordinated over time in this context, especially as the innovation process moves from idea generation to elaboration....

How do knowledge workers interact with their colleagues when organizations increasingly ask them to work on multiple activities, projects and working spheres simultaneously? Given the importance of social networks for individual and organizational success, in this study we explore the relationship between individual preferences for engaging in mult...

This paper inquires about how collaborative communities configure online and onsite collaboration practices throughout their lifecycle, paying specific attention to how knowledge practices and online-onsite collaboration practices interplay. While previous literature shows that the same online and onsite collaboration practices can be both good and...

Drawing on the literature on inter-organizational and hybrid partnerships, we put forth a process-based perspective on the evolution of regional innovation systems (RIS), with particular attention to the changing role of TTOs throughout the RIS lifecycle. We theorize on how perceptions of environmental turbulence (volatility, uncertainty, complexit...

Our research is concerned with how and why vicious circles of decision occur in hybrid partnerships. The literature reports three types of decision dysfunctions that can alter the trajectory of multi-stakeholder collaborations: escalation of commitment, procrastination and indecision. While previous studies focused on one dysfunction at a time, we...

While the interplay between practices and logics is a central tenant of the institutional logics perspective, we still know little about how institutional logics are affected and modified by the introduction of new practices. Our work investigates how the introduction of new practices meant to foster innovation leads to the emergence and stabilizat...

While organizations are increasingly relying on global virtual teams (GVTs) to carry out knowledge intensive activities, the understanding of how GVTs develop capabilities is still limited. We explore how GVTs adapt routines and build capabilities, and the role played by brokers and social identities in this process. We interviewed 49 professionals...

Global virtual teams experience difficulties in knowledge sharing, often related to identity threats that emerge across subgroups. In this conceptual paper we adopt the integrative model of subgroup relations to explore the role of multicultural brokers, i.e. team members or leaders who transcend different cultural boundaries and help to bridge dif...

Organizations increasingly rely on teams that span national and organizational boundaries, yet team members in emerging countries and vendor firms are not treated as professional peers by their Western and client-based peers. To understand how they respond to this identity threat, we integrate two literatures that suggest two possible answers: an o...

Firms devoted to research and development and innovative activities intensively use teams to carry out knowledge intensive work and increasingly ask their employees to be engaged in multiple teams (e.g., R&D project teams) simultaneously. The literature has extensively investigated the antecedents of single teams performance, but has largely overlo...

This paper investigates how individual perceptions and attitudes about an organization influence multitasking behaviors in the workplace. While we know that individuals are significantly influenced in their behaviors by the characteristics of their organizations (e.g. ICTs, organizational structure, physical layout), we still do not know much about...

As organizations increasingly rely on globally distributed teams (GDTs) to carry out knowledge intensive activities, the understanding of how GDTs develop capabilities is still limited. In this study we investigate how GDTs adapt routines and build up capabilities and the interplay between team and organizational capabilities. We collected qualitat...

In the light of economic and technological turmoil, studies on job design, work practices, and organizational design call for research on the changing nature of collaborative practices and teamwork and their implications for job and organizational design. This symposium focuses on the changing nature of teamwork and its implications for individuals...

We surprisingly know little about the process through which dynamic capabilities are generated and developed within organizations. When organizations cope with changes, they need to challenge the very essence and reflect upon the core attributes that make their employees respond to the question of ‘who are we as an organization?’, i.e. organization...

The literature on distributed work has recognized the importance of enhancing our understanding of how leadership processes change in globally distributed teams (GDTs), and of the interplay between leadership processes and the use of collaborative technologies. Following the theoretical framework of e- leadership, the aim of this paper is to explor...

The literature on distributed work has recognized the importance of enhancing our understanding of how leadership processes change in globally distributed teams (GDTs), and of the interplay between leadership processes and the use of collaborative technologies. However, we still find limited, and sometimes contradictory, empirical evidence on the t...

Globally distributed arrangements that span Western and emerging countries have become increasingly common in knowledge intensive work. In these collaborations, it is often assumed that macro level structural inequalities are a major source of difficulty for coordination and knowledge sharing. However, we know surprisingly little about how professi...

This work presents new evidence on how ethnography and the grounded theory approach can be integrated within a participatory information system development process. We conducted an ethnography in a hospital unit, collecting data from observations, interviews, and documents. The discussion about emergent themes with the actors in their natural conte...

We explore the relationship between multiple team membership (the extent to which team members are engaged in more than one team and switch between different teams in a work day) and team performance. We argue that the number of MTMs has an inverted U-shaped relationship with team performance while the team average daily MTM is negatively related t...

This paper investigates the process that leads from job dissatisfaction to new business opportunities in organizations that offshore R&D activities to emerging countries. Specifically, we investigate a major source of job dissatisfaction for offshore professionals: the misalignment between the work that they perform and their professional identity....

Globally Distributed Teams are being increasingly used by organizations to carry out knowledge intensive work and are often engaged in the development of modular products and services. While modularity is always treated as a given property of products and services, the findings of our qualitative research conducted in a GDT in charge of developing...

Purpose: The increased use of distributed work arrangements across organizational and national borders calls for in-depth investigation of subgroup dynamics in globally distributed teams (GDTs). This paper focuses on the social dynamics that emerge across subgroups of onsite-offshore teams and affect the process of knowledge sharing. Methodology/A...

Introduction Technological advances and economic changes have increasingly motivated and enabled distant collaboration between knowledge workers (Hinds and Kiesler, 2002). Offshoring of professional services (software development, financial services, radiology reads, R&D) to emerging countries provides a renowned example of this trend (Friedman, 20...

Technological advances and economic changes have enabled distant collaboration between knowledge workers, and contributed to the increased use of globally distributed teams to accomplish knowledge-intensive work. This paper presents exploratory research that aims to improve our understanding of the interplay between multiple work identities and the...

The relocation of knowledge work to emerging countries is leading to an increasing use of globally distributed teams (GDT) engaged in complex tasks. In the present study, we investigate a particular type of GDT working ‘around the clock’: the 24-h knowledge factory (Gupta, 2008). Adopting the productivity perspective on knowledge sharing ( [34] and...

Purpose The increased use of distributed work arrangements across organizational and national borders calls for in‐depth investigation of subgroup dynamics in globally distributed teams (GDTs). The purpose of this paper is to focus on the social dynamics that emerge across subgroups of onsite‐offshore teams and affect the process of knowledge shari...

This work examines how offshoring processes unfold within organizations. We present two case studies of Italian organizations offshoring R&D to Tunisia and India. Our findings show that unsatisfied professional values of some professionals trigger the recognition of new business opportunities. We discuss implications for opportunity recognition, pr...

The aim of this paper is to investigate the factors that influence the continuous use of collaborative technologies over time. We conducted a case study on a major telemedicine network in the U.S. The analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data suggests that integration with the regular workflow, stable availability of professionals at remot...

The article discusses professional identity as a significant topic for studies of organization and management, noting that it may be more significant than organizational identity in many cases. Salient features distinguishing professional identity from other forms of identity are described. It is said that ideographic organization increases the cha...

This exploratory research contrasts two globally distributed teams engaged in offshoring activities and builds a grounded theory that shows what factors facilitate the acceptance of virtual work among knowledge professionals: integration with regular workflow, sensemaking of offshoring activities, and perception of differences in competences and pr...

Purpose: Starting from the observation that new types of distributed work arrangements across organizational and national borders are emerging, we decided to investigate a particular type of globally distributed team (GDT): the 24-hour knowledge factory, where individuals work around the clock or follow the sun. Our research question is: How do ind...

Globalization and the spread of advanced information and communication technologies have encouraged a transition to distributed, virtual work practices. By reducing the costs of communication, these technologies now make it possible for more people than ever before to collaborate and compete in real time on different kinds of work from anywhere in...

Interruptions are a central characteristic of work in critical environments such as hospitals, airlines, and security agencies. Often, interruptions occur as notifications of some event or circumstance that requires attention. Notifications may be delivered actively as disruptions requiring immediate attention, or passively as unobtrusive backgroun...

Drawing on an ethnographic study of hospital work in an operating room, we present the design and implementation of a web-based role-playing application of a master schedule. We show how we simulate the coordination mechanisms and trajectories of hospital personnel as they move patients in and out of OR. Experiments are proposed to show how active...

This article investigates the process of knowledge sharing between individuals in different professional groups. Through an ethnographic study in a hospital unit, we examine the individuals’ involvement in networks of practice, their sharing of organizational values, and their operational proximity. Recent attention to networks of practice has led...