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CSCW
2016
ACM

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

7 years 12 months ago
A Contingency View of Transferring and Adapting Best Practices within Online Communities
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 i...
Haiyi Zhu, Robert E. Kraut, Aniket Kittur
Added 01 Apr 2016
Updated 01 Apr 2016
Type Journal
Year 2016
Where CSCW
Authors Haiyi Zhu, Robert E. Kraut, Aniket Kittur
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