Collaborative Proposal: Multiple Task Performance in Collaboration

随着知识型组织生产率的提高，专业人员的责任量和关系也随之增加。人们与多个同事一起在多个项目中工作。由于工作人员和项目之间复杂的相互依赖关系，任何一项任务的过载和中断都可能在整个组织中产生连锁的负面影响。这项由卡内基梅隆大学和亚利桑那大学的研究人员开展的多学科项目致力于在复杂的协作中管理相互依赖的过程。该项目结合了警察部门和专业服务组织的实地研究，人们如何分配资源和组织工作的实验室研究，以及实时多任务协作性能的计算机模型的开发。这项工作将通过提供关于复杂专业组织中的协作的新见解，为组织理论做出贡献。它将通过增加我们对替代努力分配战略如何影响协调和绩效的理解，并通过创建在多个人和项目之间分配努力的工具，来促进计算机支持的合作工作。这项工作具有重要的社会意义，因为多任务绩效对于专业组织所能做出的贡献至关重要。即使拥有高绩效的团队，如果多个任务角色和职责变得错位，组织也无法有效运作。

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.