State of the Art Review of Human-Human Collaboration Research: An Integrated, Multidisciplinary Perspective

摘要

Teamwork has been essential to the military since the initiation of warfare. It is the enhancement of individual performance that makes teamwork a necessary tool for all military leaders. There are problems to be solved that require the synergy achieved in a team setting with the sum solution being greater than the parts of the solution brought by each member of the team. The time required to do this problem solving, sometimes depicted as the Observe Orient Decide Act (OODA) loop is currently identified as the limiting factor in winning military action. The team who gets their OODA loop shorter than the other team's wins the war. Seymour (2002) points out that what was once referred to as teamwork is now often named collaboration. This change in terminology reflects the change in teamwork brought about by the technological advances that make it possible to work as a team without being physically together. Jamal and Getz (1995) also explored the concept of collaboration as a team with a stake in the outcome. Teams have traditionally required meetings to ensure that all the team members work together. This also entails travel requirements to get subject matter experts together to solve a particularly complex or difficult problem. In the current economic and technical environment, it is no longer desirable to get members of a team together for meetings. While face-to-face meetings are clearly quite useful, they are resources expensive (time, money, reduced productivity for other projects while traveling). Businesses have moved to more distributed meetings. By using technology, team members are able to communicate and meet without being in the same physical location. This has meant use of telephone and video teleconferencing (VTC). This use of technology allowed an emulated face-to-face meeting of people not collocated without travel.