The Effects of Diversity on Group Productivity and Member Withdrawal in Online Volunteer Groups
Jilin Chen, Yuqing Ren, and John Riedl. 2010. The effects of diversity on group productivity and member withdrawal in online volunteer groups. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 821-830. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753447
Summary:
In this paper, the author pointed out, on the one hand, the broader range of insights from a diverse group can lead to improved outcomes. On the other hand, individual differences can lead to conflict and diminished performance. Based on this situation, the author finds that increased diversity in experience could increase group productivity and decreases member withdrawal- up to a point. However, beyond this point, group productivity remains high while members are more likely to withdraw. And as a result, the low visibility of individual differences in the online group may allow them to harvest more of the benefits of diversity while bearing less of the cost. In this paper, the author has chosen Wikipedia as online collaborative projects to start the research.
Reflection:
In this research, the paper focused on studying diversity in online volunteer groups. In my opinion, this is really a great idea for an online collaboration group. Because online collaboration is becoming more and more popular due to many reasons. Like time using is more flexible, more volunteers, specific working places needless and so on. At the meantime, the effects of diversity is an interesting question existed in the online project teams. Because many people are focusing on the exact same question at the same time. Among these volunteers, different genders, cultural backgrounds, education level could cause various problems. I like the independent variables, controlled variables, and dependent variables designed in this paper. Especially the interesting variety. The numerical of interest is kind of difficult to be measured. But this static could be really important in some online project teams. Because more interest means more productivity and less chance to withdrawing. The method used in this paper to measure the interest could be useful in future research.
Discuss:
I think about the independent variables, the paper has already provided us with some inspirations and method about how to measure this important static. But, to be honest, I think we still need more studies and researches to calculate these factors. Only considering the domains numbers and time is not enough.
What’s more, I am not really sure about the productivity and outcomes of Wikipedia. How could we measure outcomes in Wikipedia?