The Emergence of Intra-Organizational Communities of Operations: Evidence from the Software Industry

We contemplate the concept of intra-organizational communities of operation to account for the organizational design that has recently emerged. Intra-organizational communities of operation address operative tasks of information workers within the boundaries of a firm. By relying on community principles such as self-coordination and intrinsic motivation, this design is believed to be highly scalable and efficient. In order to understand the mechanisms of how these communities function, we develop a research framework aiming to explain performance by means of constructs adapted from conventional group research. We evaluate our model in an empirical study at a large software vendor in its bug tracking process. We find that community centrality, informal roles, and heterogeneity are associated with performance while sub-network centralization and size are not. Our findings will motivate managers to benefit from intra-organizational communities’ flexibility and scalability and assist them in the design process by unveiling the mechanisms that influence performance.