Just slack it: A study of multidisciplinary teamwork based on ethnography and data from online collaborative software

Abstract

New digital technologies for team communication have changed how people work and solve complex problems. Now, millions of people use Online Collaborative Software (OCS) daily, exchanging messages and files in diverse contexts. This article presents a case study of teamwork through the lens of a popular OCS called Slack. Slack was used by a multidisciplinary academic team of designers, social scientists, and engineers working on new biomedical technology. In this work, we investigate whether activity in Slack mirrors social interactions and project progress. We compare team activity in Slack: frequencies of public messages, replies, explicit mentions, membership changes to the 18-month ethnography of the team offline. Our analysis shows team engagement around important project milestones, correlation of meeting attendance, and activity in online public discussions. We visualize the team’s multidisciplinary collaboration throughout the project and discuss the limitations of technology to reflect team interactions.

Standing strong amid a pandemic: How a global online team project stands up to the public health crisis

“…These items were selected from Aritz and Walker ( 2014 ) to measure inclusion. Moreover, student perception of co‐presence was measured following their experience of technology‐mediated connection using Slack, a platform that provides communication and collaboration options for teams (see, eg, Azarova et al., 2020 ). Finally, the items from the attitude toward using technology subscale of the UTAUT‐2 instrument (Venkatesh et al., 2012 ) were utilized as a measure of technology acceptance: Slack made the project more interesting; Working with Slack was fun; I liked working with Slack ( α = 0.95).…”

How do participants collaborate during an online hackathon? An empirical, quantitative study of communication traces

“…In other words, online discussions tend to be dominated by the same people who attend in-person events and meetings (Azarova et al, 2022). At the same time, this can potentially lead to unbalanced communication in that few https://slack.com/ users are responsible for most of the messages exchanged via the platform (Stray et al, 2019).…”

The Influence of Psychological Safety and Personality on Technology Acceptance of Team-Based Technology in Global Virtual Teams

“…While the UTAUT model has incorporated social influence into the model, it is treated "in the limited senses of either a constraint or force on the decision maker and perceived as originating from 'other people whose opinions are important to me.'" A more significant role for social dynamics is needed to address technology adoption when more than one user is necessary for the use of technology [35]. Given the team-based nature of Slack, we adopt the view that psychological safety serves as a fundamental consideration in views of Slack.…”

“…Personality was not proposed as a direct influence on technology acceptance in the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and UTAUT models [33]. In the past 10 to 15 years, some studies have explored how personality traits influence technology acceptance, particularly related to performance expectancy and effort expectancy [33,34,35,36], yet the relationships between personality traits and technology acceptance remains relatively unexplored in the context of team collaboration platforms.…”