View article

Research on small team collaboration repeatedly shows that 'distance matters'. More recent work has refined this concept of distance to develop geographic dispersion measures to explain the negative effects that team configuration has on productivity and interaction. Dispersion measures explain why teams distributed across multiple time zones, or across multiple sites, have more coordination difficulties than collocated teams with a single remote member. Although larger online communities are increasingly used in enterprises, few studies have examined the effects of dispersion on community behavior. We studied 1206 online enterprise communities (OECs), each using a set of collaborative tools. We present new data showing counter-intuitively that OEC dispersion does not affect content generation or contribution inequality, even when restricting community size to those that most resemble small teams (with 3 …