Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 242

for example, then the likelihood is that the team members will behave as

individuals.
In addition to the team level issues, you may also need to think about orga-
nizational issues (sometimes referred to as the blunt end of a system, as noted in
Chap. 10 ) . If an organization has procedures in place for how a particular job has
to be done, for example, then you will need to think about whether these proce-
dures will have to be changed. If the procedures are imposed by a regulatory
authority (as in nuclear power, for example) then you may not be able to change
those procedures, so you will have to design your system to support those pro-
cedures. There can also be cultural effects (on several levels), so there may be a
tradition for doing a task in a particular way, which is an effect of organizational
culture; we cover this in Chap. 9 .

8.6 Summary

Social factors are important. They affect the ways that teams operate, and hence
affect system performance. If you are designing systems that will be operated by
teams of people, you will need to understand that the ways that teams behave
cannot simply be described by generalizing from individual behavior. Care needs
to be exercised when generalizing from studies of different types of teams, or from
teams doing different tasks in different contexts.
You need to use the results from studies of how teams work intelligently.
Teams and their tasks will vary widely. The results probably rely on more factors
than are reported, and the type of tasks and types of group members will influence
the results but are often assumed to apply to all groups or all tasks. So we should
be cautious when generalizing or overgeneralizing from existing results. The
results about how teams work may only apply to that type of team with that type of
task, rather than all teams (larger and smaller, with different types of people)
competing or working in different environments and doing more or less similar
tasks. This reflects Clark's ( 1973 ) concern about overgeneralization in language
research. He noted that it was difficult, and even inappropriate to generalize from a
few nouns and verbs to all nouns and verbs—they come from different languages,
take different parts of speech as helpers, have different frequencies, and can be
radically different in many dimensions—as well as for teams and tasks..
In addition to understanding how teams make decisions and take actions, the
factors that influence team performance are important. In particular, the social
context of the team your system will support needs to be understood. Often this
context will not be static, but will change over time, so you need to understand
how and when the various factors that define the social context can change.
There are many examples of how a failure to give appropriate consideration to
the social aspects of systems has led to accidents. Casey ( 1998 ) notes several
including disasters with the Space Shuttle program because they ignored social and
political aspects (Starbuck and Farjoun 2005 ; Vaughan 1997 ).