EAGER: SaTC: Early-Stage Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Knowledge Convergence and Divergence in Team Performance

EAGER：SaTC：早期跨学科协作：团队绩效中的知识融合和发散

• 批准号: 1939163
• 负责人: Susan Simkins
• 金额: $ 23.5万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-10-01 至 2024-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1939163&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: EAGER; SaTC; Early; Stage; Interdisciplinary

Leveraging knowledge resources is one of the hallmarks of successful teams. Team members with diverse expertise and an awareness of "who knows what" perform better than teams with less diverse perspectives. Since 2013, the National Science Foundation's SaTC program has piloted groups of "high risk-high reward" EAGER projects to encourage early collaborations between computer and information scientists and behavioral, social, and economic scientists towards improving innovation and effectiveness in SaTC research. The current research will review the experiences of researchers and the outcomes of their projects to better understand that initiative. The project will also allow for insights into how interdisciplinary teams manage the inherent tension between knowledge convergence and divergence. Converging when diverging is needed or diverging when converging is needed mishandles team resources, impairing team processes and performance. Therefore, unlocking the simultaneous influences of knowledge convergence and divergence is central to improving team effectiveness as well as advancing team research in the decades to come. Because NSF and other granting agencies increasingly require team members to represent different disciplines, it is urgent to discover the benefits, limitations, and objective outcomes of promoting collaboration across NSF's directorates. As such, this research has the potential to improve the effectiveness of SaTC, and more generally, science teams, thereby fostering scientific breakthroughs.How should knowledge convergence and divergence in teams be balanced to maximize performance, innovation, and member satisfaction? The objectives of this research are to 1) conceptually integrate the previously independent areas of team research that have focused either on knowledge convergence or knowledge divergence 2) create new methods to assess the balance (or lack of balance) between knowledge convergence and divergence in teams, and 3) begin to assess the simultaneous effect of knowledge convergence and divergence on team effectiveness. These objectives are fittingly explored in the context of nearly 100 SaTC NSF-funded, cross-disciplinary teams. The first phase of the project involves interviews with members of a subset of interdisciplinary teams to develop metrics to assess the balance of knowledge convergence and divergence. The second phase involves surveys of past and currently funded team members to measure the simultaneous effect of knowledge convergence and divergence on objective outcomes. Outcome metrics assess, from publicly-available data, whether the projects were productive and whether investigators co-published and continued their cross-disciplinary collaboration. Together, these qualitative and quantitative studies advance the rapidly growing science of team science literature which has relied mostly on descriptive and archival research rather than primary data collection. Students will be involved in all phases of the research.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

利用知识资源是成功团队的标志之一。具有不同专业知识的团队成员，并且对“谁知道”的表现要比不同观点较少的团队更好。自2013年以来，美国国家科学基金会的SATC计划试行了“高风险奖励”渴望的项目，以鼓励计算机与信息科学家之间的早期合作以及行为，社会和经济科学家之间的早期合作，以提高SATC研究中的创新和有效性。当前的研究将回顾研究人员的经验及其项目的成果，以更好地理解该计划。该项目还将洞悉跨学科团队如何管理知识融合和差异之间的固有张力。需要分解时融合或需要分解时需要融合时，团队资源会损害团队流程和绩效。因此，解锁知识融合和分歧的同时影响对于提高团队效率以及在未来几十年中推进团队研究至关重要。由于NSF和其他授予机构越来越多地要求团队成员代表不同的学科，因此迫切需要发现促进NSF局协作的收益，局限性和客观成果。因此，这项研究有可能提高SATC的有效性，更普遍地，从而促进科学突破。这项研究的目标是1）从概念上整合了团队研究的先前独立领域，这些领域的重点是知识融合或知识差异2）创建新的方法来评估团队中知识融合和差异之间的平衡（或缺乏平衡），而3）开始评估知识融合和差异对团队有效性的同时效应。这些目标是在近100个SATC NSF资助的跨学科团队的背景下进行恰当探讨的。该项目的第一阶段涉及与跨学科团队子集成员的访谈，以开发指标，以评估知识融合和差异的平衡。第二阶段涉及对过去和目前资助的团队成员的调查，以衡量知识融合和分歧对客观结果的同时影响。结果指标从公开可用的数据中评估了这些项目是否有效以及研究人员是否共同发布并继续其跨学科合作。这些定性和定量研究一起推进了团队科学文献的快速发展的科学，主要依赖描述性和档案研究，而不是主要数据收集。学生将参与研究的各个阶段。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响评论标准来评估值得支持。