Ning Nan

University of British Columbia | UBC · Division of Management Information Systems

With the rise of machine learning (ML), humans are no longer the only ones capable of learning and contributing to an organization’s stock of knowledge. We study how organizations can coordinate human learning and ML in order to learn effectively as a whole. Based on a series of agent-based simulations, we find that, first, ML can reduce an organiz...

Digitally induced complexity is all around us. Global digital infrastructure, social media, Internet of Things, robotic process automation, digital business platforms, algorithmic decision making, and other digitally enabled networks and ecosystems fuel complexity by fostering hyper-connections and mutual dependencies among human actors, organizati...

Drawing on theories on dispersed teamwork, computer-mediated communications, and organizations, we examine the direct associations between temporal distance and team performance as well as the mediating role of team interaction. We tested our research model in a laboratory experiment with four temporal distance conditions. Results show that the dir...

Organizational crisis management has traditionally favored a centralized plan-and-control approach. This study explores the possibility for an orderly crisis management process to arise unintentionally from decentralized and spontaneous actions in an online community (i.e., self-organization). Based on complex adaptive systems theory, a multilevel...

In this paper we integrate the rich yet fragmented insights from the extensive literature on the diffusion of innovation into an elegant, coherent model. Using complex adaptive systems theory as the overarching framework, we integrate prior literature around three constructs: agents, interactions, and an environment. The integrated model is present...

In this study, we seek to understand socio-technical interactions in a system development context via an examination of the joint effect of developer team structure and open source software (OSS) architecture on OSS development performance. Using detailed data collected from code repositories from Soure-Forge.com, we find that developer team struct...

Modern organizations often consist of teams in which some people are collocated and some are remote. These teams are in-between being entirely virtual to entirely face-to-face and are referred to as partially distributed teams. Partially distributed teams function and operate in two different media environments, varying in availability of communica...

Facilitators that use a collaborative governance approach are regularly pushed, mandated, or naturally desire to achieve broad inclusion of stakeholders in collaborations. How to achieve such inclusion is an important but often overlooked aspect of implementation. To fully realize the value of collaborative governance, we investigate how institutio...

Facilitators that use a collaborative governance approach are regularly pushed, mandated, or naturally desire to achieve broad inclusion of stakeholders in collaborations. How to achieve such inclusion is an important but often overlooked aspect of implementation. To fully realize the value of collaborative governance, we investigate how institutio...

Although information systems researchers have long recognized the possibility for collective- level information technology use patterns and outcomes to emerge from individual-level IT use behaviors, few have explored the key properties and mechanisms involved in this bottom-up IT use process. This paper seeks to build a theoretical framework drawin...

Increasingly, innovative collaborative partnerships are adopted in setting that distributed organizations, groups, and individuals work together toward solving problems or projects that are too big or complex for single investigators. We look at how the growth process, a largely overlooked aspect of collaboration affects stakeholders' expectation o...

In this multi-method study, we combine a longitudinal field study and agent-based modeling to examine the social construction process of user beliefs of collaborative technology over time. We argue that the primary methods in the technology acceptance literature-variance-based analysis and interpretive case study-are limited in understanding the re...

As excessive budget and schedule compression becomes the norm in today's software industry, an understanding of its impact on software development performance is crucial for effective management strategies. Previous software engineering research has implied a nonlinear impact of schedule pressure on software development outcomes. Borrowing insights...

Significant prior research has shown that facilitation is a critical part of GSS transition. This study examines an under-researched aspect of facilitation—its contributions to self-sustained GSS use among group members. Integrating insights from Adaptive Structuration Theory, experimental economics, and the Collaboration Engineering literature, we...

Modern organizations often bring together groups in which some people are collocated and some remote. These groups often take the form of loosely-organized networks rather than hierarchies. Partially distributed groups may have characteristics that are different from fully collocated or fully distributed groups, such as being particularly vulnerabl...

We often hear that global knowledge work teams are affected by time zone differences, but most research in geographically dispersed collaboration has focused on the effects of distance and has treated time zones as a secondary factor. The experimental study we describe here is part of a larger research program aimed at understanding how technical t...

In studies about office arrangements that have individuals working from remote locations, researchers usually hypothesize advantages for collocators and disadvantages for remote workers. However, empirical findings have not shown consistent support for the hypothesis. We suspect that there are unintended consequences of collocation, which can offse...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore effective incentive design that can address the information asymmetry in knowledge sharing processes and variability of the intangible nature of knowledge. Design/methodology/approach – A principal-agent model is first developed to formulate the asymmetry of information in knowledge sharing. Then, a...

Though marketers are aware that online marketing strategies are crucial to attract visitors to Web sites and make the Web site sticky (Hoffman et al., 1995; Morr, 1997; Schwartz, 1996; Tchong, 1998), little is known about the factors that can bring out such a compelling online experience. This chapter examines how specific Web atmospheric features...

We often hear that global software engineering teams are affected by time differences. While there is considerable research on the difficulties of distance, culture and other dimensions, there has been little research that isolated the impact of just time differences. The research question that guides us is whether there are gradual differences acr...

Under what circumstances might a group member be better off as a long-distance participant rather than collocated? We ran a set of experiments to study how partially-distributed groups collaborate when skill sets are unequally distributed. Partially distributed groups are those where some collaborators work together in the same space (collocated) a...

In studies of virtual teams, it is difficult to determine pure effects of geographic isolation and uneven communication technology. We developed a multi-agent computer model in NetLogo to complement laboratory-based organizational simulations [3]. In the lab, favoritism among collocated team members (collocators) appeared to increase their performa...

This experimental study looks at how relocation affected the collaboration patterns of partially-distributed work groups. Partially distributed teams have part of their membership together in one location and part joining at a distance. These teams have some characteristics of collocated teams, some of distributed (virtual) teams, and some dynamics...

This study employed an experimental simulation to examine how well individuals and an entire distributed team could perform tasks when some members changed locations. Meanwhile, on a theoretical level it probed into the mechanism of how personnel rotation affected performance. We found that the impacts of personnel movements were asymmetric within...

Modern workplaces often bring together virtual teams where some members are collocated, and some participate remotely. We are using a simulation game to study collaborations of 10-person groups, with five collocated members and five isolates (simulated 'telecommuters'). Individual players in this game buy and sell 'shapes' from each other in order...

Manuscript under review by Experimental Psychology: Internet-based psychological experiments (special issue). The authors contributed to the paper equally. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Experiential 3-D E-commerce Conference, September 27-29, 2001, in East Lans ing, Michigan, USA.

This paper reviews the literature and examines whether a congruency effect exists if Web features (such as navigation design) and surfing motives (such as information-seeking and experiential) match up. From the literature review, we hypothesized that a static Web site design would best combine with the information-seeking motive, while a dynamic n...