Understanding IS Team Coordination in Real Time: A Process Approach to Coordination

The current research-in-progress manuscript proposes a shift to a new approach to team coordination in IS projects. Previous studies have regarded team coordination through variance analyses. They identified explicit and implicit coordination mechanisms that are significantly related to team coordination, depending on some contingencies (e.g. team and task configuration, context). While such studies have greatly advanced our knowledge of the factors that impact team coordination, we have little knowledge of the activities and events that make up team coordination, and thus how team coordination concretely occurs. We propose a process model of coordination based on psycholinguistics in which we identify the fundamental activities that IS teams perform to coordinate: interacting and contributing. We highlight the propositions that will be tested by analyzing conversations from six teams involved in scenario-based projects from the AMI meeting corpus. Our process model will unveil the fundamental activities involved in both explicit and implicit coordination.