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

利用知识资源是成功团队的标志之一。拥有不同专业知识和“谁知道是什么”意识的团队成员比观点不太一致的团队表现得更好。自2013年以来，美国国家科学基金会(National Science Foundation)的SATC计划已经试行了一批“高风险-高回报”的渴望项目，以鼓励计算机和信息科学家与行为、社会和经济科学家之间的早期合作，以提高SATC研究的创新和有效性。目前的研究将回顾研究人员的经验和他们的项目成果，以更好地理解这一倡议。该项目还将使人们能够深入了解跨学科团队如何管理知识融合和分散之间的内在紧张关系。需要发散时收敛，或者需要汇聚时发散，错误地处理团队资源，损害团队过程和绩效。因此，在未来几十年里，释放知识趋同和发散的同时影响是提高团队效率和推进团队研究的核心。由于NSF和其他资助机构越来越多地要求团队成员代表不同的学科，迫切需要发现促进NSF各主管部门之间的合作的好处、局限性和客观结果。因此，这项研究有可能提高SATC的有效性，更广泛地说，提高科学团队的有效性，从而促进科学突破。应该如何平衡团队中的知识趋同和分歧，以最大限度地提高绩效、创新和成员满意度？本研究的目的是：1)从概念上整合以往独立的团队研究领域，这些领域要么关注知识聚合，要么关注知识分歧；2)创建新的方法来评估团队中知识聚合和分歧之间的平衡(或缺乏平衡)；3)开始评估知识聚合和分歧对团队有效性的同时影响。这些目标在近100个SATC NSF资助的跨学科团队的背景下进行了恰如其分的探索。该项目的第一阶段涉及与一些跨学科小组成员进行面谈，以制定评估知识趋同和发散平衡的指标。第二阶段涉及对过去和目前获得资助的小组成员进行调查，以衡量知识汇聚和差异对目标成果的同时影响。成果衡量标准从公开的数据中评估项目是否富有成效，以及调查人员是否共同发表并继续他们的跨学科合作。总而言之，这些定性和定量的研究推动了团队科学文献的快速发展，团队科学文献主要依赖于描述性和档案研究，而不是原始数据收集。学生将参与研究的所有阶段。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.