Ó Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1997)

Although groupware is a promising new category of technology, it does not seem to fulfill the expectations that are often associated with it. In this thesis, I conducted a field study in France to further examine people’s issues around these new technologies.

The results from the study led me to introduce a negotiation framework with which I look at group processes as an ongoing negotiation between group members. Using negotiation theory, I categorized these processes into integrative and distributive ones and explained how integrative processes are related to teamwork and distributive processes to internal competition and/or use of power. This led me to identify four situations characterized the desired changes around groupware: improvement of existing integrative or distributive processes, or organizational transformation introducing new integrative or distributive processes.

Using this framework to categorize cases from the field study and from documented studies in the USA, I suggested that looking at groupware from a negotiation perspective could help differentiate between situations which are fundamentally different. In each situation, similarities in comparable cases that I observed could be related to outcomes suggested by negotiation theory.

This led me to suggest that analyzing desired changes around groupware with the negotiation framework and interpreting outcomes from negotiation theory in each situation can highlight different critical success factors, challenges or evolutionary steps that an organization might experience as it introduces groupware.