The main part of the project is successfully finished. As a next step, we are planning to send the paper for a feedback to some researchers who are domain experts as well as submit the paper to the Academy of Management 2020 conference.

This research opened up plenty of opportunities. By finding clear patterns of division of labor in OSS communities and its impact on the project growth, we provided more evidence that communities represent features of traditional for-profit organizations, and thus should be studied applying more traditional theories. Elaborating on the results we obtained, I now plan to explore this topic in greater detail by examining other important facets of division of labor. More specifically, I aim to examine the emergence of division of labor on a project – the point in time when a founder decides to delegate some of the power and decision rights to a chosen community member. Prior research has acknowledged positive effects of flattened teams on project performance, namely efficiency such as speed and amount of tasks accomplished. None of the existing studies, however, has looked at potential downsides of the delegation of decision rights that might arise from the opinions’ conflict within a newly formed management team. The main reason is unavailability of data since prior studies looked at already existing management teams. In this follow-up project, I continue working with the data from GitHub and explore the nuances of how delegation in OSS communities unfolds.