| dc.description.abstract | The problems that organizations face have become more complex and only could be solved by collaboration among members. As such, collaboration becomes the key to sustained organizational performance in modern organizations. In the knowledge era, one of the most difficult challenges for organizations is how to promote the collaboration in their social system. Because formal command and control is probably irrelevant to the dynamic, self-organizing social system, it only depends on members within the system to cooperate in a reciprocal manner.
This study adopted the Social Action Research approach to investigate the social interactions within the target organization, Research Center C. Research Center C has made great achievements in the area of space science and remote sensing for the past two decades, and is well recognized to the leader of remote sensing research in Taiwan. Based on the Social Action Research approach, we derived at a social network of learning through listen to employees, who were asked to explain how the accomplishment of the project “Land Use Monitoring Program” was achieved. Moreover using social network mapping helps managers to see the composition of a team, and how everyone contributed to the success of this project. Since social network is intuitive, managers only need to create the reflection environment to accelerate collaborative action. Finally, employees would organize themselves to improve performance and then social capital would be expanded for the organization.
Collaboration is our natural social order, so without understanding how value is created, we might diminish social capital. The incident that Mandy, a very important member of the social network, was fired during the time of this study, provides good evidence for this. The manager did not realize the full picture of the collaborative network, so he separated Mandy from the network resulted in disruption in value creation by disconnecting employees who were collaborating. As the result of this research, there was a fourfold increase of the network members without any formal command or control, but simply out of the manager’s own reflection. Furthermore, the research also finds out some gaps in this social network, so we suggest that the social network should be extended to involve more members such as related researchers and users into this project, such that social capital woulde be effectively improved by collaboration. Based on the findings of this research, managerial actions were proposed to the management of Research Center C, so that it can distribute the resources more efficiently to secure the leading position of space and remote sensing research in the future. | en_US |