INFORMS Organization Science Winter Conference

The core theme revolves around the intersection of Formal Organizations and Social Networks. Specifically, how will formal organizations deal with and adapt to the next generation of employees who have grown up embedded in large-scale, ICT-enabled social networks? What will be the impact on, organization structures, decision making, organization culture, routines, etc. when self organizing processes will of necessity substitute for traditional top down by the book management?

There is a growing body of research and practice that touches on the proposed them. Virtual organizations is an umbrella concept that encompasses research on groups of individuals whose members and resources may be distributed geographically and structurally who function as a coherent unit though the utilization of collaborative technologies. Virtual organizations include distributed workgroups, virtual teams, online communities or collaboratories. Virtual organizations often organize around flexible and resilient structures in contrast to pre-determined hierarchical structures. Within business organizations, understanding virtual organizations and more recently transforming hierarchical organizations to function as an intra social network represents a new reality. The early drivers involve the recognition that it is becoming increasingly rare that employees in the same department or unit work in a single location. Employees working together across different locations require special coordination routines, expertise and problem solving capabilities. This trend to more virtual distributed structures in business organizations is now being joined by companies implementing social networking structures and processes in part as a response to pressure from new entrants steeped in social networking. This is likely to require adopting processes for searching information and arriving at decisions that are outcomes of self organizing processes more akin to interactions in social networks.