10000 Miles Across the Room? Emergent Coordination in Multiparty Collaboration

This paper addresses cross-boundary coordination in a multiparty collaboration. So far, collaboration among among multiple dispersed parties has received scant attention in research on cross-boundary coordination. Building on this gap, this study analyzes an extreme case of inter-organizational collaboration between four geographically dispersed groups of engineers from subsidiaries of a Japanese multinational and an American engineering contractor. We explain how coordination is achieved among multiple parties. In our study, diverse boundaries posed challenges to the execution of work tasks being performed. In response, collaborating parties developed four organizing processes for coordinating their task-related activities, comprising information sharing, task negotiation, task execution and task integration. We suggest that together, these processes constitute a dynamic coordinating structure that is developed and enacted in parties' everyday collaborating and coordinating activities, which may enable but can also impede the successful execution of joint work tasks.