What makes a team work?

Understanding groups and their behaviour, is normally food for thought for psychologists. However, during the Friday Food edition of September 5th 2008 at IBBT, group behaviour was explained from another angle.

At IBBT teamwork and working in groups is a necessity. An internal project named "Coconut" (short for Communication & Collaboration Network Utilities) aims to improve working in taskforces and research groups. The Coconut project also wants to facilitate the transition from multi-disciplinary over inter-disciplinary to even trans-disciplinary working.

In a Trans-disciplinary approach, people with a different background, a different mindset and different skills are brought together. Making sure they all point their noses in the right direction is the first step in a successful project. This is, however, easier said than done.
New insights in group performance can be found in "The Small Groups as Complex Systems" (SGACS), a theory which studies group behaviour and group results from a socio-technical perspective. SGACS offers an evidence-based framework that makes it possible to diagnose and even predict deficiencies in the outcomes of group work by examining three aspects of groups: (1) the nature and interrelations of the people who make up the groups,  (2) the tasks involved in reaching the goals and (3) the tools being used.  SGACS is unique in its ability to provide variable concepts that can be measured. Using SGACS, group results can be compared in a quantitative way; it even allows us to predict the group´s performance.

What makes a number of people a group that sticks? Team can only be successful if there is sufficient overlap in knowledge, if each understands the other´s tasks, and if inter-operability between tools is present. In addition, the group members´ goals will have to be mutually compatible.

It is a big challenge to get all noses pointed in the right direction. How this is done is subject of a longitudinal case-study research into the effectiveness of interdisciplinary research, based on the framework provided by SGACS. This research starts in February 2009.

More about SGACS.