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Purpose: To lay the groundwork for effective team functioning by assessing a range of factors that influence the likelihood and degree of collaborative success.
Description: Ten key influences on the likelihood and degree of collaborative success have been identified by reviewing the literature. Team members are encouraged to develop a collaboration plan that addresses these influences on teamwork (the following is taken, often verbatim, from Hall et al, 2019):
- Rationale for team approach and team composition
- Collaboration readiness
- Technological readiness
- Team functioning
- Communication and coordination
- Leadership, management and administration
- Conflict prevention and management
- Training
- Quality improvement activities
- Budget/resource allocation
1. Rationale for team approach and team composition
The collaboration plan should:
- justify why the particular scientific questions and goals require a team approach
- describe how the team configuration meets the proposed research objectives (eg., how each team member contributes uniquely)
- discuss considerations for assembling the team (eg., what expertise is needed, history of collaboration)
- specify key stakeholders and relevant contributions of team members across the research phases.
2. Collaboration readiness
The collaboration plan should provide evidence for collaborative readiness associated with:
- intrapersonal skills and characteristics of individual members
- interpersonal skills and capacity of the team as a unit
- institutions and organisations involved, especially
- alignment of rewards and recognition for team-based research
- availability and planned use of shared resources
- strategic planning.
3. Technological readiness
The collaboration plan should:
- document the availability and planned use of technological resources to facilitate:
- data sharing and collaborative data analysis
- communication
- coordination
- provide evidence for institutional support related to:
- interoperability of proposed technology systems
- policies
- physical space designed for collaboration.
4. Team functioning
The collaboration plan should document strategies for supporting team functioning, including:
- general strategies
- identify gaps in team functioning processes and competencies
- behavioural processes
- develop shared vision, mission and goals; facilitating dialogue
- cognitive processes
- externalize group cognition throughout the collaboration
- create shared mental models of the team structure and collaborative scientific project
- foster team-level understanding of each team member’s areas of expertise, roles on the team, and contributions to science
- encourage perspective taking
- affective/motivational processes
- engage in on-going iterative reflection
- clarify roles and expectations
- foster team cohesion
- provide a psychologically safe environment
- engender confidence in team’s ability to attain shared goals
- bolster trust among team members
- fostering interdisciplinarity
- develop critical awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of contributing disciplines
- create shared understanding of key disciplinary-specific terms and develop shared team vocabulary
- foster cross-disciplinary orientation
- share knowledge
- integrate and co-produce knowledge
- integrate knowledge across stakeholders (eg., non-academic and academic)
- embrace opportunities for serendipity.
5. Communication and coordination
The collaboration plan should provide plans and strategies for:
- communication across the team and among team members
- co-ordination of day-to-day operations and the on-going achievement of scholarly benchmarks.
6. Leadership, management and administration
The collaboration plan should provide descriptions of:
- leadership approaches to address the components in the collaboration plan; include the ways all team members will serve to lead (eg., within roles/expertise) and how the team will work/lead together to achieve mission/vision/goals
- management approaches to address the components in the collaboration plan; include ways all team members will contribute to and support overall management
- strategies for recruitment, hiring, and daily administration of the team.
7. Conflict prevention and management
The collaboration plan should describe strategies for:
- preventing conflicts
- managing conflicts.
8. Training
The collaboration plan should provide description of, and implementation strategies for:
- training plans for the team and team members at the start of the collaboration and throughout, including strategies to identify gaps in competencies and skills relevant to the team
- training approaches to enhance the relevant competencies and skills of the team
- type of training format and how it incorporates the needed training content and proposed approaches.
9. Quality improvement activities
The collaboration plan should:
- describe the processes and metrics that will be put in place to ensure continuous quality improvement
10. Budget/resource allocation
The collaboration plan should:
- allocate funds in the budget for activities that facilitate the success of the team, as identified in components 1-9.
Reference:
- Hall, K. L., Vogel, A. L. and Crowston, K. (2019). Comprehensive collaboration plans: Practical considerations spanning across individual collaborators to institutional supports. In: Hall, K. L., Vogel, A. L. and Croyle, R. T. (eds.). Strategies for team science success: Handbook of evidence-based principles for cross-disciplinary science and practical lessons learned from health researchers. Springer: New York, United States of America: 587-612. (Online) (Open access): https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-20992-6_45
Related tools on this website:
- See tools tagged with ‘Collaboration,’ especially
Related topics on i2Insights blog:
- See blog posts tagged with ‘Collaboration,’ especially
- Promotion and tenure policies for interdisciplinary and collaborative research by Julie Thompson Klein and Holly Falk-Krzesinski
- Sharing mental models is critical for interdisciplinary collaboration by Jen Badham and Gabriele Bammer
- Material resources for transdisciplinary research by Chris Riedy
Related topics on Wikipedia:
Posted: November 2020
Last modified: November 2020