Replication Study: Investigating Media Choice and Types of Media Collections of Distributed Workers Using Digital Traces

Hüllmann J. A., Krebber S.

Zusammenfassung
Work is increasingly conducted in a distributed manner, enabled by a heterogeneous and growing set of digital communication and collaboration tools, which we call a media collection. This array of new digital collaboration tools with a trend towards multi-purpose integrated systems raises existing research on media collection choice into question. Based on a unique quantitative sample of digital traces, describing activity logs of tool use over a period of eight months, we replicate existing research. First, we identify the frequently used media collections and their purpose. Then, we test the association between two social factors, the assigned supervisor and coworkers, as well as physical location, with a worker's choice of a media collection. Our findings corroborate existing results that see information sharing as the dominant communication purpose in the identified media collections. Our data shows that the supervisor is strongly associated with an employee's choice of media collection, whereas coworkers and physical location are of little relevance in distributed work.

Schlüsselwörter
Media collections; Media choice; Digital traces; Distributed work; Replication study