PROMOTING GOOD MANAGEMENT: GOVERNANCE, PROMOTION, AND LEADERSHIP IN OPEN COLLABORATION COMMUNITIES

While we do have an idea of what the leadership of open collaboration communities is responsible for at a high level, we have little knowledge of what these leaders actually do. Similarly, in an online context we understand pieces of the process managers and leaders go through to be elected, but their change in behavior once they become a manager remains unexplored. What behaviors do these leaders engage in that is different from a typical contributor to the community? How can we empirically distinguish which behaviors are characteristic of a successful leader vs. an unsuccessful leader? We examine leadership promotion and performance in Wikipedia, a prominent open collaboration community. This study extends previous work on governance and leadership by developing and validating a more complete measurement model of leadership performance in an open collaboration community, and proposing a testable model of leadership promotion and performance within this context. Open Source and the Open Collaborative Process 2 Thirty First International Conference on Information Systems, St. Louis 2010 Introduction Research in open collaboration communities has examined how these communities motivate contributors (Hertel et al., 2003; Lakhani et al., 2005; Roberts et al., 2006; Shah, 2006), establish joining processes (von Krogh et al., 2003), develop social status differences (Stewart, 2005), develop communication ties (Crowston & Howison, 2005; Grewel et al., 2006), and define success for their community (Crowston et al., 2006). Much less attention in the literature has been given to the understanding of governance and leadership in open collaboration communities. Previous research examined the technical contributions, communications patterns, and network structure within open collaboration communities and developed empirical models to predict whether a candidate for promotion to leadership received the promotion (Fleming & Waquespack, 2007; O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007). While we do have a vague idea of what the leadership is responsible for at a high level, we have little knowledge of what these leaders actually do. The classical understanding was that managers in traditional organizations plan, organize, coordinate, and control (Drucker, 1954; Fayol, 1916). However, careful observation by Mintzberg later revealed a very different pattern of activities among managers (Mintzberg,1971; Mintzberg; 1990). Similarly, in an online context we understand something of the process managers and leaders go through to be elected, but their change in behaviors once they become a manager remains unexplored. Why do these relatively flat communities need a governing body? What behaviors do these leaders engage in that is different from a typical contributor to the community? How can we empirically distinguish which behaviors are characteristic of a successful leader vs. an unsuccessful leader? This study examines leadership promotion and performance in Wikipedia, a prominent open collaboration community. Previous studies have shown that as Wikipedia grows, the need for coordination, communication, policy work, and governance increases in relation to other work (Butler et al., 2008; Forte & Bruckman, 2008; Kittur et al., 2007; Suh et al., 2009). An elected group of users within Wikipedia known as administrators contribute heavily to coordination, mediation, and policy issues and will be the primary focus of this study (see Bryant et al., 2005 for a qualitative analysis of Wikipedia administrators). This study extends previous work on governance and leadership by (1) developing and validating a more complete measurement model of leadership performance in an open collaboration community, (2) proposing a testable conceptual model of leadership promotion and performance within this context. Within Wikipedia we have a history of every article a user has edited, communication between users, and a complete history of all of the user’s contributions to Wikipedia policy making and community building. In the first part of our study, we develop a list of categorical behaviors and empirical measures for those behaviors that are characteristic of administrators. The measurement model is validated through a survey of 91 Wikipedia administrators and voters in the promotion process. Using these behaviors as a guide, we then propose a testable model of promotion and administrator performance. Promotion and Managerial Performance in Open Collaboration Communities Promotions serve two roles in an organization: selection and incentive (Milgroms and Roberts, 1992; Gibbons and Waldman, 2006). First, promotions are part of a reward and incentive system to induce employees at one level of an organization to work hard in the organization's interest so that they can be promoted to positions of more power and responsibility (Lazear and Rosen, 1981). Second, they are part of a selection process in which people are vetted and assigned to the roles where they can best contribute to the organization's performance (O’Flaherty and Siow, 1992). Whether promotion functions as an incentive or a selection mechanism is likely to determine the types of evaluation criteria managers use in making promotion decisions. To the extent that promotions serve as incentives, managers should look for evidence that candidates for promotion have performed well in the past, independent of the degree to which prior job performance predicts performance in a subsequent one. Because the promotions are being used to reward past behavior and encourage effort and work quality that the organization judges as valuable, managers should base promotions on the type of behavior the organization wants to encourage, whether or not this behavior would serve the organization or candidate when the candidate ascends to a new position. For example, in a production environment like a factory, managers should promote the most productive workers to supervisor positions. In this sense, the criteria that managers use to make promotion decisions should be backward-looking; they should be looking for evidence of good performance in the prior job. Collier et al. / Governance, Promotion, and Leadership in Open Collaboration Communities Thirty First International Conference on Information Systems, St. Louis 2010 3 To the extent that promotions serve as a selection device to identify appropriate candidates for higher-level, more difficult or more valuable organizational roles, then managers should use prior job performance primarily as evidence of future performance in these new roles. In this view, the promotion view is a prediction task, and the promotion criteria that managers use should be prospective or forward-looking as they try to use prior job performance to predict performance in the new job. In the context of open collaboration communities, to the extent that promotion to an administrator position is a “badge of honor”, or an incentive for contributors to work hard, we would expect to see the tasks being performed by administrators and the qualities valued in candidates for promotion to be similar to the tasks performed by contributors. On the other hand, if the administrator position is a selection mechanism for obtaining a contributor who performs a different kind of work, we would expect to see differences in the kinds of tasks administrators perform, and the qualities valued in potential candidates. Research in open collaboration communities has only begun to address issues of governance and leadership. Shah (2006) examines both gated source and open source communities, and finds that individual motivations are different between the two governance systems: contributors to open collaboration communities' motivations within evolve with experience. Their research suggests something about the governance model and organizational purpose impacts contributors in this setting differently than in traditional organizational designs. Following this research we can then ask if the managers and leaders governing these organizations behave differently or require a different set of experiences than in traditional organizations. Fleming and Waguespack (2007) examined leadership in open innovation communities using a sample from the Internet Engineering Task Force and found that while technical contributions are important to leadership success, social connections-in terms of both brokerage and boundary spanning across subgroups of the task force-were critical to leadership success. From this we gather that social relationships and interaction with community members are important parts of being in leadership in an open innovation community-above and beyond one's technical or production capabilities. O'Mahony and Ferraro (2007) similarly found that early on potential leaders ran on a platform of technical accomplishment, and later moved to use a higher proportion of organization building language. Additionally, they found that both their technical contributions and their online communication were predictive in their success in gaining promotion to the leadership team. While both of these studies predict both production-oriented activities and interpersonal activities to increase a candidates likelihood of being promoted, once a candidate is promoted it is unclear whether this balance of activities continues to be important for managers. The role of manager in open collaboration communities likely requires a different set of requirements, and depending on prior experiences, some recently promoted managers may have more or less difficulty in adjusting to the requirements of the new role (Nicholson, 1984; Ashforth & Saks, 1995).