Social: Social Cognition and Teamwork - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 243

8.7 Other Resources
There are a number of general texts about social factors in collaboration and
teamwork that are worth reading if you wish to know more about this area. We
have cited some in the main body of the chapter (e.g., Ellison 2004 ; Hinds and
Kiesler 2002 ; Olson and Olson 2008 ) but there are many more. See, for example,
Intellectual teamwork: social and technological foundations of cooperative work
edited by Galegher, Kraut, and Egido ( 1990 , Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum).
There is an extensive literature under the titles ''computer-supported coopera-
tive work'' (CSCW) and ''computer mediated communication'' (CMC) where
many of the topics we have covered are elaborated in more detail. Conference and
journal publications in this area will provide more information and more current
information. There are also a number of initiatives in trying to build systems that
are smart about how people collaborate, employing computational agents to broker
work task accomplishment in teams. See, for example, chapters in Ye and Chur-
chill (eds.) (2003). Agent supported cooperative work. Boston, MA: Kluwer.
If you are interested in how to design teams, rather than just how to design
systems to support team performance, Vicente ( 1999 ) presents a useful approach.
He argues for laying out all the tasks that the team will do, effectively a task
analysis writ large. Then you group the tasks so that there are natural breaks
between sets of tasks, taking into account communication and how tasks interact.
He argues that this leads to better team performance because the tasks are more
naturally divided.
Work by Judy and Gary Olson are particularly relevant here. They have studied
how computer-supported communication changes how teams work, and provide
some design advice about how to support teams in such projects:
Olson, G. M., & Olson, J. S. (2007). Groupware and computer supported cooperative
work. In J. J. Jacko & A. Sears (Eds.), Handbook of human-computer interaction (2nd
Ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Olson, G. M., & Olson, J. S. (2003). Mitigating the effects of distance on collaborative
intellectual work. Economics of Innovation and New Technologies, 12, 27-42.
8.8 Exercises
8.1 Look through the list of the ways that email has gone awry, See how many
examples you can find of (a) diffusion of social responsibility, (b) pluralistic
ignorance, (c) attribution errors, and (d) majority/minority effects.
8.2 Imagine you are working on a project where the team is distributed across
three locations, all in different time zones. You have been asked to identify
videoconferencing tools that can be used to carry out monthly progress
meetings and to select the best one for the job. List the factors that you would
use to inform your decision, and explain why they are important.