A Cognitive Description of Collaboration and Coordination to Help Teams Identify and Fix Problems

Abstract : This paper describes how team collaboration and coordination work from a cognitive perspective, with the goal of helping explain guidelines for diagnosing and fixing team problems. These guidelines are based on the tautology that teams provided with appropriate communications connectivity can collaborate effectively if individual team members know what they need to know to do so, and that teams whose members lack this knowledge are prone to various kinds of predictable collaboration problems. The guidelines describe collaboration and coordination problems that arise from various kinds of knowledge shortfalls, provide metrics for the risk and occurrence of these problems, and suggest processes and tools to avoid or fix team difficulties. The paper begins by summarizing the benefits and costs of teamwork. It next describes the knowledge that team members need to work together effectively, and reviews the interaction of this knowledge with team dynamics. It then summarizes seven causes of team behavioral problems that may arise from knowledge gaps, errors, and inconsistencies. The article concludes by describing the guidelines for diagnosing and correcting team problems.