Intellectual Teamwork

Social and Technological Foundations of Cooperative Work

Jolene Galegher, Robert E. Kraut, Carmen Egido

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780805805345
• eBook ISBN: 9781317784159
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book seeks to establish an interdisciplinary, applied social scientific model for researchers and students that advocates a cooperative effort between machines and people. After showing that basic research on social processes offers much needed guidance for those creating technology and designing tools for group work, its papers demonstrate the mutual relevance of social science and information system design, and encourage better integration of these disciplines.

This comprehensive collection closely examines the variety of electronic tools being deployed to solve traditional problems in communication and coordination. Unfortunately, research shows that these tools have not been as successful as their designers had envisioned, partially because they were not always produced with the needs and goals of their human users in mind. The editors' goal is to entice more social scientists to orient their research around questions of practical interest to information system designers and to convince designers to search for the knowledge about social and organizational behavior that would make their tools more useful.

1

Technology for Intellectual Teamwork: Perspectives on Research and Design

Jolene Galegher

University of Arizona

Robert E. Kraut

Bell Communications Research

Abstract

Intellectual teamwork is an increasingly important segment of white collar work, and information system designers are working to create technologies that will help groups perform more effectively. However, creating practical information technology requires not only technical expertise, but also an understanding of the social and behavioral processes that the technology is designed to support. Social science knowledge about groups and organizations could be extremely valuable in designing tools to help people communicate and structure their work, yet this knowledge is underused. This chapter presents reasons for that underuse and suggests that, to avoid reproducing these difficulties in new technological domains, social scientists should become actively and directly involved in design.

Most of the work that people do requires some degree of cooperation and communication with others—some kind of teamwork. In this book, we’re particularly interested in intellectual teamwork and in the design of information systems to support it. The concept of intellectual teamwork embraces information intensive work of many kinds; it includes the formulation of corporate strategy, consultative medical diagnosis, and collaborative scientific research. It also includes the design and development of such diverse products as computer hardware and software, advertising campaigns and jointly authored magazine articles. The central image underlying these examples is one of individuals working together to produce or manipulate information; they illustrate that intellectual teamwork occurs in an enormous variety of tasks and settings.

The Soul of a New Machine, Tracy Kidder’s (1981) entertaining account of the development of a new computer, provides a detailed portrait of a prototypical instance of intellectual teamwork. Kidder showed how the design ideas for Data General’s new computer grew out of conversations between the engineers who had been recruited to the design team, and portrayed the importance of coordinating work, tracking progress and keeping records. He also demonstrated how individual involvement in the project was sustained by a combination of the intellectual challenges that the project presented and commitment to the group engendered by isolation, time pressure, and a sense of being part of a special mission. Finally, he showed how the group’s ability to sustain itself and to carry out its mission depended on its success in representing its needs and achievements to other individuals and groups in the organization.

This account provides a rich source of evidence about the multidimensionality of group effectiveness. According to observers of group processes such as Hackman (1983) and McGrath (1984; chap. 2 in this volume), a group’s effectiveness can be measured in terms of three criteria: its productivity; the extent to which it provides individual members with whatever social, material or intellectual rewards they are seeking; and its ability to sustain itself as a social unit over time. Their analyses reveal the complex interplay of skills, motivations, and organizational support required to complete a complicated project. This complexity creates particular difficulties in carrying out projects such as those previously described.

For instance, when complex tasks are partitioned among individuals, either because there is too much work for one person or because diverse kinds of expertise are needed, the added burdens of communication and coordination tend to counteract the productivity gains obtained by division of labor (Brooks, 1982). In addition to the difficulties that might arise from these structural factors, performance problems may result from social psychological processes. Conformity pressure may cause individuals in brainstorming groups to perform less effectively than they would have if they had been working alone; diffusion of responsibility and lack of ownership of a group product can cause individuals to put forth less effort to accomplish a group task than an individual task. Finally, members of a group may shut out relevant information to maintain group cohesion (Diehl & Stroebe, 1987; Janis, 1972; Latane & Nida, 1981). Social psychologists have come to refer to problems like these as “process losses” (Steiner, 1972).

Although these properties of groups and organizations are problematic for managers and supervisors who are concerned about productivity, and create frustration for individual workers as well, they present opportunities for computer scientists and software builders—the better mousetrap builders of the late twentieth century. In fact, both popular and scholarly writers (Dhar & Olson, 1989; Greif, 1988; Richman, 1987) have identified “technology for collaborative work” as an important focus of leading-edge information systems research, and there are many exciting developments occurring in this area at industrial and academic research labs around the country. These developments include computing and communication systems that are designed or can be used to support the sort of work already described. Many of them assume the presence of and familiarity with computers, but unlike software designed for word processing and data analysis they are intended to aid workgroups, project teams or whole organizations rather than to support the completion of specific tasks by individuals.

This realm includes both widely used, commercially available technologies and others that are almost unknown outside the narrow community of researchers whose work is represented here. The more familiar systems include: electronic mail, which permits users to send messages to each other via computer networks, providing a fast, low-cost alternative to surface mail and inter-office memoranda; computer conferences, which are the electronic equivalent of bulletin boards, permitting the development of online, asynchronous, multiperson discussions, the contents of which are available to all members of the conference; and audio and audio/video teleconferencing, which are designed to permit multiple, geographically dispersed users to hold meetings without the expense and inconvenience of travel. Some examples of the more exotic technologies are: group decision support systems, which are designed to improve the quality of group decisions by relying on computer software to guide deliberation and choice; hypertext software systems, designed to permit scholars and students to access and modify a common file, creating a network of linked, text and graphic entries and annotations on a common topic; and “virtual hallways,” which combine audio and video technology to provide a continuous link between users at different sites as a way to overcome the barriers to informal communication imposed by distance.

These and other systems are described more fully in the following chapters; here, it is sufficient to note that all of these systems are intended to help people engaged in collaborative intellectual work communicate and structure their work. They differ on many dimensions including flexibility, expertise required to use them, ease of implementation, and cost. Taken together, they have the potential to provide people with the capacity to communicate across boundaries of time and distance and to increase the ease and effectiveness of their work.

Recently, these possibilities have elicited the interest of a small number of social and behavioral scientists whose theoretical interests include factors that affect human communication and the performance of groups and organizations. Simultaneously, the difficulty of developing systems that are appropriate to users’ needs has prompted system builders to seek a more refined understanding of how people work together as a basis for design. These parallel developments have led to the establishment of a new field of research called computer-supported cooperative work, drawing together the interests of these two communities. The aims of researchers in this field are to describe both the general features of collaborative intellectual work and the specific details of particular kinds of collaboration, to create technological systems that will improve the quality and efficiency of collaborative work and foster kinds of collaboration that would be impossible without advanced communication and computer support, and to assess the impact of these technologies on individuals, groups and organizations.

But these are very challenging goals, and there is currently a considerable gap between the state of our achievements in this area and the ends that we believe it is possible to attain. This book is based on the premise that careful understanding of collaborative intellectual work is crucial for the design of information technology to support that work. The goals of this introductory chapter are to describe some of the difficulties that have occurred as a result of failure to incorporate this understanding in the design of information systems, to identify factors that inhibit communication between systems designers and social and behavioral scientists, and to point out some of the difficulties that confront designers who seek to translate the wisdom of social science into system design. On the basis of this analysis, we argue for a new approach to system development, one in which behavioral researchers shift from reacting, as they do when they investigate the effects of technology, to being actively involved in design decisions, and in which systems developers seek this input as a way of insuring that designs are congruent with the intellectual and social processes they are intended to support.

DESIGN PROBLEMS IN TECHNOLOGY FOR COOPERATIVE WORK

The history of experience with telecommunications and computer-based information systems contains many instances of expensive technological failures that are at least partly attributable to designs that do not mesh well with the social and behavioral systems in which they are to be used. We have reviewed these problems elsewhere (Galegher, 1987); here we present just two examples to give credence to our argument. The first concerns the long history of attempts to use telematics to improve communication among scientists and engineers. The goal of these attempts has been to capture the research literature of a discipline in computerized databases and to increase the scope of coverage, the number of researchers with access, the rapidity and accuracy of retrieval, and the ease of using retrieval systems. This goal continues to dominate thinking about the role of information technology in scientific communication. (See, for instance, the recent Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science [January 1988], devoted to discussions of scientific communication in the information age.)

But studies of the dissemination of scientific information and patterns of interaction among scientists (Crane, 1970; Garvey & Gottfredson, 1977; Garvey, Lin, & Nelson, 1970) suggest that these efforts may be too limited. These studies have shown that scientists rely heavily on informal communication within a network of scholars working on related topics to find out about new research. Through their informal networks, researchers in some disciplines know about 60% of the literature relevant to their specialty before it appears in published form. Their informal interactions help researchers learn which new research results are interesting and important enough to learn more about, and to learn this information before the research results become stale through publication delays. These long-standing behavior patterns imply that although computerized databases may be useful for archival purposes, they may not be the most effective way to broaden the distribution of scientific knowledge. In fact, almost twenty years ago, Crane (1970, p. 40) wrote, “Programmes for dealing with the ‘information explosion’ in science ought to be directed toward bringing relatively isolated scientists into contact with scientists who are the foci of communication networks. These individuals who sort, sift and channel information are more likely to be useful in orienting the activities of other scientists than computers which store vast quantities of information but are by their very nature unable to evaluate its potential relevance in terms of the sophisticated criteria required for developing new ideas in scientific research.” Crane’s observations imply that if information technology is to be useful in establishing links between working scientists, it must be designed to support rich communication between individuals, rather than to provide an electronic warehouse for scientific research.

A similar conclusion about the necessity to support rich communication may be drawn from the history of experience with teleconferencing. Egido (this volume) argues that teleconferencing, especially videoconferencing, has failed to live up to vendors’ optimistic predictions of extensive reliance on these technologies as a way to reduce travel costs because particular features of the technology make conversation within teleconferences difficult and because eliminating travel to offsite meetings also eliminates the opportunities for informal interaction that executives value as a way of promoting themselves and their ideas. Of course, creating technologies that would support richer communication is not the solution for every design problem in this domain; rather, these two examples serve to illustrate the more general thesis that information system designs must somehow be appropriate for the tasks they are meant to support.

DILEMMAS IN LINKING SOCIAL SCIENCE TO DESIGN

Why does technology fail to reflect what we know about social interaction in groups and organizations? We believe that problems like these stem, in part, from fundamental differences in the orientation of social scientists and technology designers. Social scientists are chiefly concerned with identifying regularities in human behavior. Their intellectual goal is to understand why humans behave as they do; their professional goal is to identify new research topics—areas of uncertainty about behavior that research could help reduce. On the other hand, design is fundamentally an engineering discipline; the goal is to find solutions to problems, not understanding for its own sake. Social scientists have information that is relevant to design, but rarely develop the practical import of their findings in ways that would allow designers to act on them. As a result, social scientists and designers who have much to say to each other nevertheless manage to talk past each other. Furthermore, these value differences have become enshrined in institutional structures—separate departments housed in different buildings, separate professional meetings, and separate journals. These various forms of isolation mean that it may take a long time for developments in one of these domains to be felt or have an influence in the other.

But even if designers were cognizant of all the relevant theory and research, translating these insights and observations into workable and useful information technology would be extremely difficult. Thus, we do not want to claim that linking theories of social behavior to the design of technologies to support social interaction is an easy, or even straightforward, enterprise. The difficulty stems not so much from the conceptual inadequacy of social and behavioral theories or the methodological inadequacy of the research (although such inadequacies certainly exist) as from the great complexity of the phenomena. For instance, as we noted earlier, workgroups and organizations have multiple goals and the importance of any one of them is likely to shift rapidly and, perhaps, unpredictably, over time; furthermore, the range of potential communication and information processing demands presented by even a few examples of intellectual teamwork is vast. These realities make designing information systems to support the multiple agendas and modes of communication that exist in complex social arenas a formidable task, indeed.

To illustrate this point in more depth, we consider the case of computerized group decision support systems (GDSSs). Behavioral research on individual and group decision making has clearly demonstrated that both cognitive biases and social constraints can and often do prevent people from behaving in ways that theories of rational choice predict. System developers have devoted considerable attention to improving decision processes by managing both the flow of data about the decision problem and the flow of communication among decision makers because of these problems and because of the importance of decision making in organizational life. (See Kraemer & Pinsonneault, chap. 14 and Vogel & Nunamaker, chap. 19 in this volume, for descriptions of these technologies and a review of research about their impact.)

Many of the features built into GDSSs are designed to improve decisions by reducing uncertainty; under uncertainty, the decision maker lacks the information needed to assess the likelihood of alternative outcomes given the choices. In principle, however, uncertainty can be reduced by gathering information relevant to the decision. For instance, a group of executives meeting to set prices on a line of consumer products would likely want to know about the sales history of similar products, the demographics of potential customers, manufacturing costs, and the like. In addition, they might want to attempt to predict the influence of a number of factors including price on consumer demand. Providing access to relevant databases and tools for building a model of consumer demand would help to reduce the decision makers’ uncertainty about these issues, and the tools to achieve this uncertainty reduction can be made a part of a GDSS.

However, many organizational problems involve not only uncertainty, but also equivocality, uncertain preferences, and internal conflict over goals and values. Thus, decision making requires not only gathering data, but interpreting the problem, defining goals and strategies, and representing the decision effectively to internal and external constituencies. Under equivocality, decision makers may not know how to interpret the information they have at hand, or what information to gather to resolve the problems they face. Furthermore, decisions are often made by management teams, executive committees or task forces, so in addition to the information-processing problems resulting from equivocality and difficulties over goals, and the political problems that arise from differences in perspectives, there are communication problems that arise in the interaction among decisio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Technology for Intellectual Teamwork: Perspectives on Research and Design
• Part I Basic Social Processes
• Part II Field Studies of Collaborative Work
• Part III Experiences With Technology for Cooperative Work
• Part IV Technology for Cooperative Work
• Author Index
• Subject Index