  As the volume and complexity of distributed online work increases, the
collaboration among people who have never worked together in the past is
becoming increasingly necessary. Recent research has proposed algorithms to
maximize the performance of such teams by grouping workers according to a set
of predefined decision criteria. This approach micro-manages workers, who have
no say in the team formation process. Depriving users of control over who they
will work with stifles creativity, causes psychological discomfort and results
in less-than-optimal collaboration results. In this work, we propose an
alternative model, called Self-Organizing Teams (SOTs), which relies on the
crowd of online workers itself to organize into effective teams. Supported but
not guided by an algorithm, SOTs are a new human-centered computational
structure, which enables participants to control, correct and guide the output
of their collaboration as a collective. Experimental results, comparing SOTs to
two benchmarks that do not offer user agency over the collaboration, reveal
that participants in the SOTs condition produce results of higher quality and
report higher teamwork satisfaction. We also find that, similarly to machine
learning-based self-organization, human SOTs exhibit emergent collective
properties, including the presence of an objective function and the tendency to
form more distinct clusters of compatible teammates.
