The Coordination and Collaboration Process within Committees in the Information Age

Abstract

In today’s information age teams reside in multi-participant problem solving processes that operate within both the physical and virtual environment (Gibson & Cohen, 2003). Teams in order to collaborate form their own “space of constraints” whether they act in the physical, the virtual environment or in both (Bordetsky, 1996). Scholars have examined teams that operate in the physical space (such as cliques by Poran & Sabastien, 1998; and teams in general by Salas et. al., 1992) or in the virtual space (Gibson & Cohen, 2003; Yoo, 2001) and examined coordination and collaboration within committees using the majority rule (Bordetsky, 1996; Miller & Page, 2007). In addition, teams’ decomposition applies when complex problems arise (e.g. swarm groups as proposed by Arquilla, J. & Ronfeldt, D, 2000). Hence, a literature gap exists in addressing the dynamic, in terms of time, collaboration process that exists within committees with fluidic participation which operate in both the virtual and physical environment. In order to address this issue, the research design is presented which is divided into three mutual interdependent steps. As an initial step a theoretical System Dynamics model of collaboration is generated based on literature. The second step involves field experimentation which will be conducted within the Tactical Network Topology (TNT) experimentations to obtain the coordination process and the factors that affect coordination. Furthermore, the multivariate nature of this problem is examined with the Parameter Space Investigation (PSI) method of multi-criteria optimization (Statnikov, 2002) in order to identify the temporal equilibrium states of the coordination process using the data from the field experiments. The combination and repetition of these three steps can be used to examine the process of collaboration of a committee that operates both on the physical and virtual space on the basis of a time path.