Abstract
Online communities, much like companies in the business world, often need to transfer "best practices" internally from one unit to another to improve their performance. Organizational scholars disagree about how much a recipient unit should modify a best practice when incorporating it. Some evidence indicates that modifying a practice that has been successful in one environment will introduce problems, undercut its effectiveness and harm the performance of the recipient unit. Other evidence, though, suggests that recipients need to adapt the practice to fit their local environment. The current research introduces a contingency perspective on practice transfer, holding that the value of modifications depends on when they are introduced and who introduces them. Empirical research on the transfer of a quality-improvement practice between projects within Wikipedia shows that modifications are more helpful if they are introduced after the receiving project has had experience with the imported practice. Furthermore, modifications are more effective if they are introduced by members who have experience in a variety of other projects.
Original language | English (US) |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016 |
Publisher | Association for Computing Machinery |
Pages | 729-743 |
Number of pages | 15 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450335928 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 27 2016 |
Event | 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016 - San Francisco, United States Duration: Feb 27 2016 → Mar 2 2016 |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW |
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Volume | 27 |
Other
Other | 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2016 |
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Country/Territory | United States |
City | San Francisco |
Period | 2/27/16 → 3/2/16 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We thank Yochai Benkler, Yuqing Ren, Jason Hong, and the members of the GroupLens at University of Minnesota for helpful feedback. We also thank Doug Phillips and Jacob Thebault-Spieker for editing help. This research was supported by NSF grants IIS-1111166, IIS-1217559, IIS- 0968484, IIS-1111124 and IIS-1149797, Google Faculty Awards, Google Social Interactions program, and Facebook PhD Fellowship.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 ACM.
Keywords
- Best practice adaptation
- Contingency view
- Practice modification
- Propensity score matching (PSM)