RAPID: The Changing Nature of Work: Dynamic Reconfiguration and Visualization in the Context of Covid-19 Contact Tracing

COVID-19 cases in the U.S. now total over 3.5 million with over 138,000 deaths. The infection has also had a profound negative effect on the United States? economy, and it has been estimated that two months of shutdown costs the overall economy over $2 trillion. We are often presented with the difficult choice of either sacrificing the physical health or the financial health of our citizens. This could be a false choice, however, if the nation were able to quickly identify, isolate and treat the specific locations where the virus was most prevalent. Contact tracing is one potential solution to this dilemma. The purpose of this research is to examine the degree to which an organizational redesign intervention centered around collaboration and multiteam systems, accompanied with a new social network-based visualization tool, can increase the speed, accuracy, and meaningfulness of contact tracing work. This would allow a surgical approach to mitigation, instead of a nation-wide shutdown, thus facilitating an adaptive and efficient system that would allow economic activity to take place in locations where there is not an unacceptably high level of threat to public health. Findings from this project will contribute to both the health and well-being of our society, as well as to our financial recovery and economic competitiveness in the 21st century.

Contact tracing has been used with diseases such small pox, tuberculosis, measles and HIV, but the nature of Covid-19 often makes the process as traditionally conducted unsuitable due to the infection?s speed and scope. This project studies the adaptation of contract tracing work to these new circumstances. We know that many scientific, business and military organizations seeking to increase their responsiveness have redesigned the nature of work around team-based structures that are flexibly arranged into temporally-bound and reconfigurable multiteam systems. These reconfigurable structures allow organizations to execute tasks that are larger in scale and scope relative to what can be accomplished by individuals working alone or in small teams, but also create opportunities for quick pivots in task execution. This project will examine the impact of this intervention using a staggered cohort research design and social network visualization. The project will sample actual contact tracers, creating 40 15-person multi-team systems. Each multi-team system will include three, five-person virtual teams. The teams will be provided with a social networking visualization tool that will convert contacts into links or ties. The project will examine the impact of this intervention on the performance of units, teams, supervisors and the tracers themselves. Due to the difficulty of collecting data on (a) large numbers of comparable multiteam systems and (b) the time-sensitive granular social networks, the data generated by this proposal will add critically needed evidence pertaining to the development and deployment of reconfigurable structures, with important implications for organizational theory and for addressing organizational responsiveness in contexts that such as extreme events, including those beyond the current pandemic.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.