Gulati, Piyush; (2022) Breaking Down Remote Silos: How Worker Characteristics Affect Remote Interactions in OSS Communities. Academy of Management Proceedings , 2022 (1) , Article 11197. 10.5465/ambpp.2022.130.

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Abstract

Remote work creates communication silos within organizations. Overcoming these silos is an important problem for organizations to solve as it is rarely feasible to perfectly organize interdependencies within them. In this paper, we focus on the individual level and ask: what worker-level characteristics are associated with a higher frequency of cross-silo distant interactions? We explore answers by leveraging open-source software (OSS) communities as the context. OSS communities are standards of all-remote globally-dispersed organizations, where a mix of unpaid volunteers and paid firm-sponsored employees undertake software development. Based on a problemistic-search decision model, we argue that volunteers undertake a higher degree of exploratory remote interactions as they are motivated by an individual-level need for recognition and knowledge. Moreover, the lower the accomplishment of their goals, relative to social aspirations, the higher the level of exploration they are likely to undertake. On the contrary, for firm-sponsored contributors, the presence of firm-level commercial motives and pecuniary benefits is expected to lower returns to exploration. We test and find supportive evidence for our theory using email metadata and text from the Linux-kernel project that spans 3,734 contributors, 25 timezones, and 130 months of software development work from January 2010 to October 2020. For practitioners, the findings of this paper have implications for how they recruit and incentivize workers.

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