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A Contingency View of Transferring and Adapting Best Practices within Online Communities

Haiyi Zhu,R. Kraut,A. Kittur

Published 2016 in Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

ABSTRACT

Online communities, much like companies in the business world, often need to transfer 'best practices' internally from one unit to another to improve their performance. Organizational scholars disagree about how much a recipient unit should modify a best practice when incorporating it. Some evidence indicates that modifying a practice that has been successful in one environment will introduce problems, undercut its effectiveness and harm the performance of the recipient unit. Other evidence, though, suggests that recipients need to adapt the practice to fit their local environment. The current research introduces a contingency perspective on practice transfer, holding that the value of modifications depends on when they are introduced and who introduces them. Empirical research on the transfer of a quality-improvement practice between projects within Wikipedia shows that modifications are more helpful if they are introduced after the receiving project has had experience with the imported practice. Furthermore, modifications are more effective if they are introduced by members who have experience in a variety of other projects.

PUBLICATION RECORD

  • Publication year

    2016

  • Venue

    Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work

  • Publication date

    2016-02-27

  • Fields of study

    Business, Computer Science

  • Identifiers
    DOI 10.1145/2818048.2819976
  • External record

    Open on Semantic Scholar

  • Source metadata

    Semantic Scholar

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