The Profound Influence of Small Choices in Digital Collaboration

The widespread shift to remote work over the past several years has made digital collaboration tools increasingly essential to employee communication and coordination. Many managers worry that a decrease in face-to-face interactions between employees could be suppressing creativity and innovation, and they are relying on software such as enterprise social media and chat tools to help knowledge workers. Our study looks at how the features of these platforms affect the direction of creative collaboration, and how can managers help teams use them in ways that support the type of collaboration that will be most productive in a given case.

We studied these questions, focusing on how the use of such tools affected two dynamics that previous research has shown influence the process and outcomes of creative teams and problem-solving: transparency and privacy. The organizational choice between transparency and privacy has traditionally been reflected in physical workplace design trends, such as open-plan offices. However, digital collaboration platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams provide greater flexibility, allowing groups to create public or private channels tailored to specific projects. The decision to make a group transparent or private significantly influences member communication and connection patterns, thereby shaping the communication structure and creative outcomes of the collaboration.

The results show that simple decisions about how to use collaboration tools can set teams on a path toward either incremental or breakthrough innovations. Transparency allows groups to engage with a broader community, fostering bridging relationships with diverse individuals and exposure to fresh perspectives, which help incremental innovation. Conversely, private collaboration offers a safe space characterized by trust, facilitating authenticity, risk-taking, and idea incubation, which create space for breakthrough innovations.

Read the full article at MITSloan Management Review (external link, opens in new window) 

Watch the video (external link, opens in new window)  created based on our research results.