Instant messaging (IM) is one of the newest and fastest-growing communication technologies in the workplace today, yet little is known about its real implications for worker productivity. We have taken the particular affordances of instant messaging as the basis for extrapolating from and linking prior studies of email use, polychronic communication, and task interruptions to develop propositions regarding the unanticipated individual-level productivity implications of widespread IM use in the workplace. We argue that while instant message communication may accelerate particular tasks and decision processes, unstructured IM use will likely contribute to erosion in individuals' overall productivity due to an increase in users' communicative workloads, engagement in polychronic communication, and an increase in the frequency of interruptions. We intend our proposed model and propositions as an impetus for further study of both the benefits and challenges of workplace instant messaging.

We are grateful to FacilityEast members and Hardware Inc. Facility managers for allowing us access to their worklives and workspaces. This work has been funded by National Science Foundation grant number IIS-0085725. Please do not cite or distribute without authors ’ permission.

Organizational approaches to knowledge management are unlikely to lead to organizational wisdom unless the organization increases its awareness of factors that contribute to epistemological myopia--a nearsightedness that limits what and how the organization knows and how it learns. Contributors to this myopia include organizational learning pathologies, an unquestioning acceptance of fundamental concepts, such as time, and measuring success as the absence of failure. In many instances, the vocabulary, language, and business methods used by an organization, society, or culture reify these pathological factors and thereby further hamper the potential for learning. By raising our awareness of these contributors and the factors that support their reification and continued acceptance, we seek either to avoid these limitations or to develop corrective lenses that can extend the organization’s vision and enable it to resolve issues with greater clarity. The conceptual frameworks used in this chapter are drawn from four distinct areas of study: systems theory, organizational knowledge and learning, the organization as a learning community and community of practice, and linguistic relativity. The underlying theme is the organization as an

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Creating successful strategic alliances pose a significant challenge to interorganizational managerial teams when called upon to administer them. Using shared mental model theory as a framework, we propose that the effectiveness of these managerial teams can be increased if the team shares a common temporal mental model with regard to the alliance. Specifically, if team members have a shared mental model in terms of the elements of entrainment (e.g., cycle, pace, time orientation) it will allow them to actively assess and better manage entrainment issues which we suggest are a crucial component of strategic alliances, although not one studied to great extent at this time. AoM Submission ID: 12772 Alliance Management Teams and Entrainment 3 Strategic alliances represent one way in which organizations respond to environmental uncertainty caused by increased globalization and technological advances (Arino & de la Torre, 1998; Ireland, Hitt, & Vaidyanath, 2002). However, strategic alliances are difficult to maintain and make successful, creating a significant challenge for the managers that make up the interorganizational management teams assigned to oversee such relationships. While researchers