"The double-edged sword of inflated help": Unravelling the motivation crowding in community question-answering platforms.

The growth of digital platforms has led to the proliferation of Online Communities, providing individuals with opportunities to seek help and share knowledge. A key challenge of help-related platforms that address technical questions (i.e., utilitarian, rather than opinion or supportive) is to ensure the contributions address seekers' specific information needs. Despite growing academic interest in such platforms, research has mainly focused on factors that influence the quantity of contributions, ignoring whether these contributions effectively helped the seekers. To fill this research gap, this study draws upon theories of self-determination and motivation crowding to examine contributing behaviors that result in successful helping. By analyzing a rich dataset collected from an online Q&A platform, we find that gains in a help provider's past rewards positively influence the success of contribution. Further, while previous studies suggest that external rewards result in a high quantity of contribution, our findings show that an inflated frequency of contribution leads to a crowding-out effect. Specifically, the contribution frequency has a curvilinear relationship with the success of the contribution. Taken together, these findings demonstrate there is a need to revisit the gamification mechanism on help-related platforms to ensure the success of knowledge contribution. This is crucial for the sustainability of these platforms as low-quality answers can lead users to mistrust and eventually leave the platform.

Openness as Organizing Principle: Introduction to the Special Issue.

'Openness' has become an organizational leitmotif of our time, spreading across a growing set of organizational domains. However, discussions within these specialized domains (e.g. open data, open government or open innovation) treat openness in isolation and specific to the particularities of those domains. The intention of this Special Issue therefore is to foster cross-domain conversations to exchange insights and build cumulative knowledge on openness. To do so, this Introduction to the Special Issue argues that openness should be investigated as a general organizing principle, which we refer to as Open Organizing. Across domains, we define Open Organizing as a dynamic organizing principle along the primary dimension of transparency/opacity and the secondary dimensions of inclusion/exclusion and distributed/concentrated decision rights. As such, Open Organizing raises an overarching problem of design, which results from more specific epistemic, normative and political challenges.

Expertise Diversity, Informal Leadership Hierarchy, and Team Knowledge Creation: A study of pharmaceutical research collaborations.

Knowledge creation increasingly requires experts from diverse domains to collaborate in teams, yet the effect of expertise diversity on team knowledge creation is inconclusive. We focus on task uncertainty and informal leadership hierarchies - the disparity in team members' engagement in leadership activities (task- and relationship-oriented) - to answer the questions when and why expertise diversity may hinder team knowledge creation. We develop a model in which informal leadership hierarchy mediates the conditional indirect effect of the team's expertise diversity on its knowledge creation under different levels of task uncertainty. We test this moderated mediation model using multi-source data from self-managing project teams comprising collaborators from a pharmaceutical company and its research partners. We find that when task uncertainty is low, the indirect effect of expertise diversity on team knowledge creation is positive, whereas when task uncertainty is high, it is negative. This conditional indirect effect occurs via task-oriented but not relationship-oriented leadership hierarchy. Our findings provide insights into the mechanisms and boundary conditions for expertise diversity to hinder, rather than facilitate, knowledge creation in collaborations.

How do healthcare providers construe patient complexity? A qualitative study of multimorbidity in HIV outpatient clinical practice.

INTRODUCTION: Patient complexity is an increasingly used concept in clinical practice, policy debates and medical research. Yet the literature lacks a clear definition of its meaning and drivers from the health provider's perspective. This shortcoming is problematic for clinical practice and medical education in the light of a rising number of multimorbid patients and the need for future healthcare providers that are adequately trained in treating complex patients. OBJECTIVES: To develop an empirically grounded framework of healthcare providers' perceptions of patient complexity and to characterise the relationship between case complexity, care complexity and provider experience as complexity-contributing factors. DESIGN: Qualitative study based on semistructured in-depth interviews with healthcare practitioners. SETTING: A Swiss hospital-based HIV outpatient clinic. PARTICIPANTS: A total of 31 healthcare providers participated. Participants volunteered to take part and comprised 17 nurses, 8 junior physicians (interns) and 6 senior physicians (residents, fellows and attendings). RESULTS: Perceived patient complexity arises from the combination of case complexity drivers, the provider's perceived controllability, and a set of complexity moderators at the levels of the patient, the care provider and the broader care context. We develop a conceptual framework that outlines key relationships among these complexity-contributing factors and present 10 key questions to help guide medical professionals in making complexity more explicit and more manageable in daily practice. CONCLUSIONS: The framework presented in this study helps to advance a shared understanding of patient complexity. Our findings inform curriculum design and the teaching of essential skills to medical students in areas characterised by high patient complexity such as general internal medicine and geriatrics. From a policy perspective, our findings have important implications for the design of more effective healthcare interventions for complex patients.

Rethinking leadership in drug discovery projects.

Great efforts have been dedicated to rebuilding the engine of pharmaceutical R&D. However, one potential area of improvement has received limited attention in the literature and in practice: namely, leadership. In this article, we enrich the traditional views of leadership, which consider leadership a responsibility of a few centrally placed authorities, with the concept of distributed leadership. Distributed leadership reflects a group-based capability driven by everyday activities and the key scientific questions at hand. We identify three leadership challenges faced by R&D teams that could be addressed by implementing distributed leadership. Furthermore, we provide some suggestions as to how to foster distributed leadership in drug discovery projects.

Clusters in the biopharmaceutical industry: toward a new method of analysis.

Clusters are groups of co-located and interconnected firms and institutions linked by commonalities in their strategies and complementarities in their activities and resources. There are several reasons for the geographical clustering of firms in the biopharmaceutical industry. This review unpacks some advantages and disadvantages of cluster participation, and proposes a new method to enable managers and researchers to identify clusters in the biopharmaceutical industry.

Strategic groups in the biopharmaceutical industry: implications for performance.

The biopharmaceutical industry is characterized by intense competition, high uncertainty, and strong dependence on scientific knowledge. We show that in order to succeed in this industry, firms need to be positioned along three strategic dimensions: the level of inter-firm R&D partnering, the level of diversification, and the size of the firm. Prior research has revealed that a firm's membership in so-called 'strategic groups' impacts strongly on its performance. This study analyzes strategic groups in the biopharmaceutical industry along the strategic dimensions listed. The performance of the groups differs significantly. The best performing groups are the ones that consist of large firms with a high level of in-house diversification across therapeutic areas and the medium-sized firms that pursue partnership with other companies.