EXPLICIT CHOICES AND EMERGENT WORK PRACTICES IN GLOBAL TEAMWORK

The technical advances in computer hardware, software, and infrastructure have increasingly optimized conditions for the application of Internet-based tools to support collaborative teamwork in the past decade. This paper presents the valuable findings that resulted from of a number of studies in industry and education environments that highlight the process, critical explicit choices, and emergent work practices in global teamwork. Key questions are (1) What people experience when interacting with the technologies? (2) Why people practice in the way they do? (3) How the practice fits into the environment and changes the work patterns. Observations indicate that (1) explicit choices of core team values, team’s mode of operation, and collaboration technologies affect teamwork patterns and lead to emergent behaviors and work practices, (2) high performance teams that use the collaboration technologies effectively exhibit collaboration readiness at an early stage and manage to define a “third way” to meet the demands of the cross-disciplinary, multi cultural and geographically distributed AEC teamwork. The observations represent the blueprint for innovations and improvements in both the design and development of collaboration technologies and work processes.