Collaborative Proposal: Multiple Task Performance in Collaboration

随着知识型组织生产力的提高，专业工作者的责任数量和关系也随之增加。人们与多个同事一起从事多个项目。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对整个组织产生连锁的负面影响。这个多学科项目由卡内基梅隆大学和亚利桑那大学的研究人员共同完成，旨在解决复杂合作中相互依赖关系的管理过程。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有关复杂专业组织中协作的新见解，为组织理论做出贡献。它将通过增加我们对可选择的工作分配策略如何影响协调和性能的理解，以及通过创建跨多人和项目分配工作的工具，为计算机支持的协作工作做出贡献。这项工作具有重要的社会意义，因为多任务的执行对专业组织能够做出的贡献至关重要。即使有高绩效的团队，如果多个任务角色和职责不一致，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.