Productive Interrelationships between Collaborative Groups Ease the Challenges of Dynamic and Multi-Teaming

Abstract

Work organization and team membership is highly complex for modern workers. Teams are often dynamic as personnel change during a project. Dynamic team members have to be actively recruited and personnel changes make it harder for participants to retain group focus. Workers are often members of multiple groups. Though prior work has identified the prevalence of multi-teaming and dynamic teams, it has been unable to explain how workers cope with the challenges the new style of work should cause. This paper systematically characterizes the modern organizational landscape from an individual perspective, by studying how people typically organize work across their multiple collaborative groups. A unique contribution of our work is to examine the interrelationships between the collaborative groups individuals typically participate in. We introduce the notion of a collaboration profile to characterize these interrelations. We expected workers to be overburdened by contributing to multiple teams often with shifting personnel. However, we found that multi-teaming involves productive interrelationships between collaborative groups that ease some of the documented challenges of dynamic teams, such as goal setting, recruiting, and group maintenance. We define a typology that describes the various types of collaborative groups workers participate in, and provide examples of productive interrelations between collaborations. In characterizing interrelations between collaborations, we provide detailed examples of how people exploit resources across their different collaborations to address the problems of working in multiple dynamic teams.

Informal Process Essentials

“…To overcome complex problems, teams are built up [15] and they use numerous resources, e.g., a custom JDK, a custom Linux distribution, etc. Each team member can typically participate in more than one team with different roles and each of these teams can be associated with different resources [17], [21]. Moreover, each of these resources can collaborate with multiple resources.…”

“…Matthews et al [17], [21] mention the notion of dynamic teams, i.e., changing team structures based on changing needs. Similarly, the set of human resources of informal processes can change after initialization.…”

Beyond end user content to collaborative knowledge mapping

“…With the explosion of social software and Web 2.0 applications, there is a host of new tools available, including wikis, social file repositories, forums, blogs and microblogs. This rapid emergence of new social tools and new tool features, means that online communities often do not know which tools to deploy or how to use them effectively [2,17,21,27]. If communities were limited to a single social tool for all their needs, choices might be easier, but communities can now combine multiple tools for interaction, archiving, and other needs.…”

“…If communities were limited to a single social tool for all their needs, choices might be easier, but communities can now combine multiple tools for interaction, archiving, and other needs. The problem is exacerbated in mature communities, who may have multiple older tools to manage as well [17]. In this new context, how are enterprise online communities composing multi-tool technology environments, and can we provide guidance to leaders about effective tool combination practices?…”

Group dynamics findings from coordination in problem solving and decision making meetings

“…Several authors have evaluated similar settings. Rienks and Zhang [3] are looking into participation levels, Matthews and Whittaker [2] are looking at teams from the individual's perspective. Kelly and Fisher [1] are analyzing structures that emerge from collaborations in teams.…”