Conflict Management And Improved Design In Online Mass Collaboration System

Along with the development of Web2.0and implementation of user generated content (UGC) model, individual users are playing a pivotal role in the process of content creation (or production). Mass collaboration platforms (e.g. Wikipedia), which rely on the contributions from a huge number of participants and harvest the wisdom of crowds, have been gradually recognized by the public. And the collaboration model behind such platforms also accelerates the transformation of product research&development process, even the organization structure in many enterprises, such as Procter&Gamble, and IBM.Although extent studies have addressed the theory and application of mass collaboration, there is no unified description of mass collaboration. The statements of this concept are varied according to different research contexts. Moreover, many new concepts that emerged from academia and business have been used interchangeably with mass collaboration without distinction. These concepts are similar, but misusage will cause issues such as inappropriate theory appliance in the research process. Thus, a systematic conclusion of the characteristics and definitions of mass collaboration should be conducted (Research Question1). By content analyzing31studies on mass collaboration collected from foreign publication databases, this study extracts keywords that illustrate characteristics of mass collaboration and maps them into9perspectives of the Input-Process-Output model. Comprehensive description and definition of mass collaboration are then summarized. This concept is compared with14similar terms, and the differences are highlighted. Prime examples are mapped into the9perspectives to verify the definition. Future work is discussed based on the characteristics of mass collaboration. The orientation, resolution and management of conflict have always been the core issues that focused by group collaboration studies and business. Currently, the number of studies on conflict in mass collaboration is limited. Most of extent studies are descriptive analysis based on certain cases, and they do not contain theoretical model, moreover, the distinct characteristics of mass collaboration can cause the inappropriate implementation of current conclusions of conflict management. At the same time, almost all of current mass collaboration platforms do not have effective conflict management sub-systems or policies, and these functions will be more and more important due to the requirement of cost and quality management. Thus, based on taking English version of Wikipedia as example, this thesis will investigate the following questions:In order to illustrate the universality of conflict in mass collaboration (research question2), this thesis uses label-based and data-based methods to calculate the ratio and the extent of the conflict. The result shows that conflict, being the representative of the maintenance costs, its ratio will continue increase as the mass collaboration platforms (or artifacts) evolve. Among every100revisions, there are approximately6.8times of "revert" or "undo", influencing about34.6times of contribution.Although the cost of conflict is high, few studies have evaluated the influence of conflict (research question3). This thesis explains how conflict interacts with its antecedents (participation and task complexity) and decedent (group performance) related to the mass collaboration process. Research hypotheses and model are put forward based on literatures, and structural equation model (SEM) is used to validate the model. Results suggest participation increases task complexity, conflict and performance, task complexity and conflict increases group performance, but task complexity decreases conflict. Theoretical and practice implications of the research model are discussed.From network structure perspective, during the process of conflict creation and resolution, the interaction among Team members can form a series of patterns. Extent studies focus more on how individuals deal with conflict, as well as how group management conflict, but ignore the influence of these conflict patterns (research question4). This thesis uses social network approach to construct conflict network, and classifies subgroups of conflict network into several patterns. By using SEM analysis, the results shows that self-loop, star and mass conflict structures positively influence group performance, but bi-party and linear structures negatively influence group performance. This thesis discusses the implications of the result.It has attracted much attention about how to manage conflict and utilize conflict to enhance the group performance without sacrificing consensus and affective acceptance among group members. In order to utilize conflict (research question5), this thesis puts forward three new functions, including a paragraph-based history list with text comparison, a visualization of conflict network and content ownership. These functions give users awareness of a detailed evolution history of the content, pointing out arguable pieces of content, and fulfilling the needs of psychological ownership. A survey study is conducted, and the results from SEM analysis confirm the usefulness of the new design, showing that the functions can significantly enhance the influence of conflict awareness on participation and conflict resolution. The theoretical and practical implications of this new design are discussed.This research has several shortcomings, some of them point out the direction of future work. The measurement of conflict should be refined, and using university students as sample in the survey study may cause unstable results, moreover, the new design of wiki can be improved.