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Assessing Collaboration Within and Between Teams: A Multiteam Systems Perspective

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Innovative Assessment of Collaboration

Abstract

Developing assessment methods that capture an individual’s capability to collaborate can look to the team and multiteam systems literature, which identifies six critical components of collaboration. These six include team affect/motivation, team interaction processes, and team cognition, as well as corresponding constructs at the system level, multiteam affect/motivation, between-team interaction, and multiteam cognition. This chapter defines and distinguishes teams and multiteam systems and discusses the importance of that distinction for assessing individual collaborative capacity in both small stand-alone teams and larger systems of teams working toward superordinate goals. Particularly, we describe confluent and countervailing forces—the notion that what enables team functioning and effectiveness may or may not also enable the multiteam system effectiveness. Assessments of individual contributions to team and multiteam dynamics must consider the implications to functioning both within and between teams.

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Acknowledgements

We thank our research collaborators, especially Noshir Contractor and Steve Zaccaro, who have generously contributed to many of the ideas in this chapter through insightful discussions. The preparation of this chapter was supported by the Army Research Institute for the Social and Behavioral Sciences under contract W5J9CQ12C0017, and the Army Research Office under contract W911NF-14-1-0686. The views, opinions, and/or findings contained in this report are those of the authors, and should not be construed as an official Department of the Army position, policy, or decision, unless so designated by other documents.

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Correspondence to Raquel Asencio .

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Asencio, R., DeChurch, L.A. (2017). Assessing Collaboration Within and Between Teams: A Multiteam Systems Perspective. In: von Davier, A., Zhu, M., Kyllonen, P. (eds) Innovative Assessment of Collaboration. Methodology of Educational Measurement and Assessment. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33261-1_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33261-1_3

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