are at the heart of the value chain in the technology industry of the 21st century.
[…], since the famous Hawthorne experiments, the relevant research had taken place mainly in organizations of industrial production. There, groups were easy to discover because of the formal organization of work and their spatial (machine-related) coherence. But this also spared the question whether the extent to which formal organization leads to the formation of informal groups does not vary from type of organization to type of organization, so that the findings on informal organization can only be generalized to a very limited extent. …