Collaborations among researchers and across disciplinary, organizational, and cultural boundaries are vital to address increasingly complex challenges and opportunities in science and society. In addition, unprecedented technological advances create new opportunities to capitalize on a broader range of expertise and information in scientific collaborations. Yet rapid increases in the demand for scientific collaborations have outpaced changes in the factors needed to support teams in science, such as institutional structures and policies, scientific culture, and funding opportunities. The Science of Team Science (SciTS) field arose with the goal of empirically addressing questions from funding agencies, administrators, and scientists regarding the value of team science (TS) and strategies for successfully leading, engaging in, facilitating, and supporting science teams. Closely related fields have rich histories studying teams, groups, organizations, and management and have built a body of evidence for effective teaming in contexts such as industry and the military. Yet few studies had focused on science teams. Unique contextual factors within the scientific enterprise create an imperative to study these teams in context, and provide opportunities to advance understanding of other complex forms of collaboration. This review summarizes the empirical findings from the SciTS literature, which center around five key themes: the value of TS, team composition and its influence on TS performance, formation of science teams, team processes central to effective team functioning, and institutional influences on TS. Cross-cutting issues are discussed in the context of new research opportunities to further advance SciTS evidence and better inform policies and practices for effective TS. (PsycINFO Database Record

This Commentary describes recent research progress and professional developments in the study of scientific teamwork, an area of inquiry termed the “science of team science” (SciTS, pronounced “sahyts”). It proposes a systems perspective that incorporates a mixed-methods approach to SciTS that is commensurate with the conceptual, methodological, and translational complexities addressed within the SciTS field. The theoretically grounded and practically useful framework is intended to integrate existing and future lines of SciTS research to facilitate the field’s evolution as it addresses key challenges spanning macro, meso, and micro levels of analysis.

Collaborative problem solving (CPS) is an important 21st century skill that is increasingly recognized as being critical to efficiency, effectiveness, and innovation in the modern global economy (Fiore, Graesser, & Greiff, 2018; Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2017a). CPS has attracted interest in international assessments; national assessments of middle and high school students; and training in colleges, industry, and the military (Care,

A theory of macrocognition in teams can provide guidance for the development of training interventions and the design of collaborative tools to facilitate knowledge-based performance in teams.

Knowledge integration in diverse teams depends on their integrative capacitythe social and cognitive processes, along with emergent states, that shape a team's ability to combine diverse knowledge. We argue that integrative capacity represents the potential that a team has to overcome various compositional, team, and contextual barriers to generating integrated and novel knowledge. This article focuses specifically on the unique challenges facing diverse science teams that have the goal of generating novel knowledge at the intersection of disciplinary, practice, and organizational boundaries. The integrative capacity of a science team is argued to help facilitate the social and cognitive integration processes necessary for effective team processes that enhance the likelihood of innovative team outcomes. Implications of our theoretical framework for practice and research on fostering innovation in diverse science teams are discussed.