Vinay Tiwari’s research while affiliated with Erasmus University Rotterdam and other places

Achieving shared, common, or mutual understandings among geographically dispersed workers is a central concern in the distributed work literature. Nonetheless, little is known yet about the socio-cognitive acts and communication processes involved with synchronizing and cocreating understandings in such settings. Building on a case study of a geographically distributed information systems development project at one of India 's largest offshore vendors, we postulate that knowledge and experience asymmetries, and requirements and task characteristics (such as complexity, instability, ambiguity, and novelty) prompt onsite and offshore team members to engage in acts of sensegiving, sensedemanding, and sensebreaking. This allows them to make sense of their tasks and their environment, and it increases the likelihood that congruent and actionable understandings emerge. Furthermore, it assists them in cocreating novel understandings, especially when acts of sensegiving and sensedemanding are complemented with instances of sensebreaking. Our results contribute to the literature by explaining how distributed team members mitigate problems of understanding, transfer preexisting understandings, and cocreate novel understandings. Acts of sensegiving, sensedemanding, and sensebreaking allow distributed team members to jointly explore and generate value, thereby amplifying the performance of distributed workers.

The last decade has witnessed a sharp increase in offshore outsourcing activities (Hirschheim et al., 2005), which Robinson and Kalakota (2004: 4) define as “the delegation or subcontracting of administrative, engineering, research, development, or technical support processes to a third-party vendor based in a low-cost location”. Although such activities may entail numerous benefits, compared to conventional outsourcing, offshoring generally faces organizations with additional complications (Carmel and Tjia, 2005; King et al., 2004).

Intensified competition and advances in telecommunications, accompanied with increasing maturity of offshore IT vendors (Carmel and Agarwal 2002; Gartner and Marriot 2003; Hirschheim, et al. 2005), have resulted in the proliferation of Information System Development (ISD) outsourcing. Perceived cost advantages, flexibility, and the availability of a competitive labor pool have compelled various organizations to outsource work to “offshore” countries (Carmel and Agarwal 2002; Robinson and Kalakota 2004). Although traditional ISD outsourcing projects already face challenges related to the notorious complexity of systems development (Brooks 1987; Keil and Mann 2000), to users’ inability to accurately specify requirements (Boland, 1978), and to developers’ inability to elicit requirements from users (Davis 1982; Salaway 1987), offshoring further exacerbates these problems. The distinct backgrounds, experiences, and cultures of participants in offshore relationships (Carmel 1999; Carmel and Tjia 2005) give rise to differences in perceptions, assumptions, and understandings among stakeholders, which tend to be particularly significant during requirements development (Sommerville and Sawyer 1997; Damian and Zowghi 2003). For such projects to become successful, it is imperative that multiple stakeholders develop sufficiently similar understandings of requirements so that the software that is eventually developed by offshore vendor teams is valued by clients and on-site team members.

Achieving shared, common, or mutual understandings among geographically dispersed workers is a central concern in the distributed work literature. Nonetheless, little is known yet about the socio-cognitive acts and communication processes involved with synchronizing and cocreating understandings in such settings. Building on a case study of a geographically distributed information systems development project at one of India's largest offshore vendors, we postulate that knowledge and experience asymmetries, and requirements and task characteristics (such as complexity, instability, ambiguity, and novelty) prompt onsite and offshore team members to engage in acts of sensegiving, sensedemanding, and sensebreaking. This allows them to make sense of their tasks and their environment, and it increases the likelihood that congruent and actionable understandings emerge. Furthermore, it assists them in cocreating novel understandings, especially when acts of sensegiving and sensedemanding are complemented with instances of sensebreaking. Our results contribute to the literature by explaining how distributed team members mitigate problems of understanding, transfer preexisting understandings, and cocreate novel understandings. Acts of sensegiving, sensedemanding, and sensebreaking allow distributed team members to jointly explore and generate value, thereby amplifying the performance of distributed workers.