VOSS: Culture and Coordination in Global Engineering Teams

建筑工程为社会提供了基础：我们每天使用的建筑物、桥梁、道路和其他基础设施。工程工作变得越来越复杂，大型工程项目几乎总是由工程师团队承担，他们的成员是跨文化的，分布在全球各地。有效的协调对成功至关重要，但最近的研究表明，团队协调做法因国家文化而异。专家警告说，工程教育无法让工程师为这些差异做好准备。我们将使用位于社会心理学和人工智能领域的交叉点的脚本理论来表征工程团队的特定文化协调实践，引入“文化协调脚本”的概念。我们将1)描述和理解几种特定文化的协调脚本，2)展示文化协调脚本如何与技术培训和技术任务交织在一起，3)确定跨文化全球分布的团队中文化协调脚本的差异如何影响他们协调高度精确工作的能力，并取得创新、安全、及时和具有成本效益的成果。我们试图预测可能的协调失败点。数据收集将包括对单一文化和多文化并置和分散的工程设计团队协调活动的不引人注目的纵向观察。这一研究计划将帮助工程师--以及在多文化、多国家项目团队工作的其他人--变得更善于预测和跨越与项目协调相关的不同文化期望。将为工程教育和实践制定建议。协调实践中的文化差异在应用程序的各个领域都没有得到充分的研究，因此我们的工作将提供关于这个中心团队过程的新知识。我们还提供了一种新的方法来捕捉团队工作的复杂性“一种基于脚本理论的方法”，这种方法有可能影响跨学科的研究。

Construction engineering provides the foundation for society: the buildings, bridges, roads and other infrastructure we use every day. Engineering work has become increasingly complex, and big engineering projects are almost always undertaken by teams of engineers whose members are multicultural and distributed around the globe. Effective coordination is crucial for success, yet recent research suggests that team coordination practices vary with national culture. Experts have warned that engineering education fails to prepare engineers for these differences.We will use scripts theory, which lies at the intersection of the fields of social psychology and artificial intelligence, to characterize the culturally-specific coordination practices of engineering teams, introducing the notion of "cultural coordination scripts." We will 1) characterize and understand the coordination scripts of several specific cultures, 2) show how cultural coordination scripts are intertwined with technical training and technical tasks and 3) determine how differences in cultural coordination scripts in multi-cultural globally-distributed teams affect their capacity to coordinate highly precise work and achieve innovative, safe, timely and cost-effective outcomes. We seek to predict likely points of coordination failure. Data collection will include unobtrusive longitudinal observation of the coordination activities of mono-cultural and multi-cultural collocated and distributed engineering design teams.This research program will help engineers -- and others who work in multicultural, multi-national project teams -- become more adept in anticipating and working across different cultural expectations related to project coordination. Recommendations will be developed for engineering education and practice. Cultural differences in coordination practices are understudied across domains of application, so our work will provide new knowledge concerning this central team process. We also offer a new approach to capturing the complexity of teamwork "an approach grounded in scripts theory" that has the potential to influence research across disciplines.