Lena Waizenegger

Being connected to the Internet through various mobile devices is pervasive in our daily professional and private lives. Yet, the way people connect, including when, with whom and through which communication channels differs, manifesting individuals’ idiosyncratic connectivity patterns. In team collaboration, where individuals are dependent on each other’s availability and responsiveness, differences in team members’ connectivity patterns can lead to clashing expectations concerning connectivity. This, in turn, can compromise individuals’ well-being and productivity and threaten team collaboration outcomes. In this paper, we address the question of how to manage connectivity in interdependent teams and align connectivity patterns to facilitate successful collaboration while at the same time safeguarding individuals’ connectivity boundaries. To address this question, we conducted a qualitative case study that involved 39 semi-structured interviews with employees and members of the management board of an international consultancy headquartered in Germany. Building on concepts established in boundary theory, we coined the term “connectivity boundaries” and identified the six boundary work tactics, externalizing, accommodating, adapting, pushing, sacrificing, and enforcing that allow team members to create, maintain, temporarily change, and reclaim their connectivity boundaries and achieve team collaboration success. We developed propositions that highlight which contextual factors and goals are associated with which boundary work tactic.

Robotic process automation (RPA) is often used in organisational digitalisation efforts to automate work processes. RPA, and the software robots at its heart, is an equivocal and contentious technology. Adopting the products of theorising approach, this study views metaphors as central sensemaking and sensegiving devices that shape the interpretation of RPA among stakeholders towards a preferred reality of ways of seeing and experiencing software robots. The empirical materials are drawn from research in three Australasian organisations that have implemented RPA. Grounding our analysis in the domains-interaction model, we identified three root metaphors: person, robot and tool, their constitutive conceptual metaphors, and intended use as heuristics devices. Our findings show that metaphor is a powerful device that employees rely on to make sense of their experiences with a new digital technology that can potentially shape their roles, work practices and job design. In addition, managers and automation team members intentionally leverage metaphors to shape others’ perceptions of a software robot’s capabilities and limitations, its implication for human work and its expanding benefits for organisations over time, among others. Metaphor as a precursor to more formal theory provides scholars with a vocabulary to understand disparate experiences with an emergent automation technology that can be further developed to generate a theory of seeing automation and working with automated agents.