Strategies and expectations must be in place for defining
the short term, long term as well as nature of work. The network life cycle
must be clear to members of networks. With fast cycles focused on meeting the
financial (and strategic) goals of the organization, an often neglected area by
leaders and executives is clarity on the expectations and life cycle of the
member of the organization or network.
For example, trustworthiness of UPS/ Fedex delivery person/
or a TaskRabbit delivering the flu medicine from Walgreens is about delivery
adhering to the values of the organization backing the person – external or
internal. It is clearly short term and the nature of work is clear. The person
is an entity or an object with a very standard, well defined identity.
Long term may be about 5 – 7 years for a researcher in a
research team on a certain topic in a university. Plagiarism and other
integrity checks are in place in school settings.
For a software engineer, technology cycles can be very fast
if they are building apps, a range of two years to a decade if they were to
work on delivering versions of large scale technologies. At the system level,
many technologies are born and delivered with re-use and replication.
In knowledge based work environments – differences in
capacities and talents of team members is expected. Knowledge transfer is part
of the values and principles of the members to deliver where boundaries are
blurred between the receiver/ member and the provider/ leader. In such tightly coupled scenarios, protecting
IP is a matter of definition. The expectations, principles, and values matter
more.
Electronic copy of the research conducted by
Prof Frank Piller, Germany on the organizational factors
influencing the balance between openness and closed ness (trust and mistrust)
can be found at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2164766. The authors hypothesize on
how the organization’s structural dimensions “specialization, formalization,
and decentralization” affect the gains of openness. Several other factors not
considered in the research are also mentioned. The firm’s environmental
context, the nature of innovation tasks are some of those factors.
