Our latest library entry is the research paper, Intercultural Collaboration in Global Team by Professors Pamela Hinds and Catherine Cramton. The authors describe the challenges and opportunities in intercultural collaboration and the impact of culture on best practices for globally distributed work teams. Their goal is to provide a framework for thinking about cultural differences and intercultural collaboration in globally distributed teams. This is an understudied area with perhaps as many questions as answers.

This study reviews approaches that some firms are taking to provide new services and products that integrate place, ICT, and organizational behavior to create what the authors call “integrated workplaces.” Redefining workplaces and real estate projects as integrated spaces and projects where technology and place become interwoven with organizational and personal behavior will require a substantial mind shift, the authors maintain. Their paper explores the premise that this integration will transform the workplace and large-scale real estate projects and examines how this transformation will create new business opportunities. The report was prepared for Tekes, the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, and the findings will be used in the future Spaces and Places Tekes Program.

The US General Services Administration initiated a new program that aims to understand better the linkages between the workplace and organizational effectiveness. This program was motivated by the desire to bring the federal workplace into better alignment with the technological, organizational and demographic shifts that characterize work today. The process and methodologies in pilot projects are used to develop a workplace that more effectively supports the client organization’s business goals and needs than current workspaces. The research approach studies these sites pre- and post-occupancy to identify the extent to which desired outcomes have been achieved. The research approach uses the Balanced Scorecard as a framework for developing goals, hypotheses and metrics for each project.

This paper reviews research on and
 explores the links between aspects of new ways of working and sustainability. The basic question asked 
is whether new ways of working can contribute to a more sustainable way of working and a more
 sustainable world – and if so, how?

Member Judith Heerwagen has contributed a paper on building sustainability: Green Buildings, Organizational Success and Occupant Productivity. The paper examines these questions: What are the key green building features and attributes? How do these physical elements affect the physiological, psychological, cognitive, and social functioning of building occupants? Can green buildings affect high-level organizational outcomes, such as profitability, customer satisfaction, and innovation? If so, what are the linkages?

June Langhoff investigates the latest research on productivity and virtual teams in this March 2006 NewWOW white paper. She finds conflicting reports on the productivity of remote virtual teams. Some researchers have witnessed design breakthroughs of startling proportions, such as the jet engine design project at Dassault Aviation. Others maintain that it is impossible to achieve real innovation in a culture of distributed teams. Which interpretation is correct? Are virtual teams the final answer to organizational creativity and economic growth? Are they another management fad? Or are they an economic necessity in an era of global off-shoring to reduce cost, but with few or even negative impacts on creativity and little or no proof to back up enthusiastic claims?

This paper, a chapter in an upcoming book about virtual teams, explores how data of various kinds can be applied using a decision process to determine when and how distributed work can benefit organizations, teams, and individuals, and describes the data-driven methods used successfully at Sun Microsystems, Inc. to make business-focused decisions about distributed work options. It is based on the experience of the authors, Anita Kamouri and Eric Richert, at Sun Microsystems.