Collaborative Proposal: Multiple Task Performance in Collaboration

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As productivity in knowledge organizations has risen, the quantity of responsibilities and the relationships of professional workers have likewise increased. People work on multiple projects with multiple colleagues. Because of the complex interdependencies among workers and projects, overload and interruption on any one task can have a cascading negative effect across the entire organization. This multidisciplinary project by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and University of Arizona addresses the processes of managing interdependencies in complex collaborations. The project combines field studies in a police department and a professional service organization, laboratory studies of how people allocate resources and organize their work, and development of computer models of real-time multiple task collaborative performance. The work will contribute to organizational theory by providing new insights about collaboration in complex professional organizations. It will contribute to computer-supported cooperative work by increasing our understanding of how alternative effort allocation strategies affect coordination and performance and by creating tools for allocating effort across multiple people and projects. This work is socially significant because multiple task performance is essential to the contributions that professional organizations are able to make. Even with high-performing teams, organizations cannot function effectively if multiple task roles and responsibilities become misaligned.