Emergent Decision-making Practices in Technology-Supported Self-Organizing Distributed Teams

We seek to identify work practices that make technology-supported self-organizing distributed (or virtual) teams (TSSODT for short) effective in producing outputs satisfactory to their sponsors, meeting the needs of their members and continuing to function. A particularly important practice for team effectiveness is decision making: are the right decisions made at the right time to get the work done in a way that satisfies team sponsors, keeps contributors happy and engaged, and enables continued team success? In this research-in-progress paper, we report on an inductive qualitative analysis of 120 decision episodes taken by 2 Free/libre Open Source Software development teams (the completed paper will include 360 episodes from 6 teams). Our analysis revealed differences in the performance of the two teams that seems to be related to differences in overall project effectiveness.