Location-Independent Organizations: Designing Collaboration Across Space and Time

Abstract

Collaboration is critical to organizations and difficult when work is distributed. Prior research has indicated that when individuals are distributed, organizations respond by structuring their work to decrease reciprocal interdependence, reduce the complexity of tasks that individuals perform, or accept moderate inefficiencies. Yet in an increasing number of organizations—location-independent organizations—employees are fully distributed, exist without a physical office, and engage in reciprocally interdependent work. To understand how these distributed organizations collaborate, I undertook an inductive multiple-case study. I identify two patterns of collaboration, an asynchronous orientation and a real-time orientation, and reveal the specific enabling practices for each, with a focus on asynchronous-oriented organizations. This research contributes to the distributed work literature by detailing three novel practices that enable effective collaboration for reciprocally interdependent work without geographic or temporal alignment and to the organizational design literature by identifying distinct approaches to distributed collaboration. This study also engages with the future-of-work conversation by providing empirical grounding that enhances our understanding of the theory, boundary conditions, and nuance of the phenomenon of distributed organizations, specifically location-independent organizations.