Multiple Team Membership: Managing Competing Demands for Member Time and Attention

Madison Romero

Abstract: In our work with multidisciplinary science teams as part of the GW/Children's Clinical Translational Science Institute (CTSI), a major concern of principal investigators (PI) is that team members often work on projects simultaneously; therefore, it is often challenging to devote the necessary time and effort to any one PI's project. Thus, we sought to understand the (1) challenges PIs face in managing projects with members with competing obligations, and (2) strategies they have found useful in overcoming them. Our research team conducted virtual and in-person focus groups with CTSI teams. After transcribing and coding the data, results confirmed that a dominant obstacle to project completion is the ability for team members to dedicate the necessary time and energy to a project throughout its lifecycle. As one PI noted, "oftentimes people are very busy‚Ķ [They are] not opposed to participating, but just don't have the bandwidth to dedicate to participation." To understand strategies PIs used to address this obstacle, we drew on emerging research related to multiple team membership (MTM). Margolis (2020) proposed using an attention framework by Good et al., (2016) for understanding effective multiteam membership in terms of the quality of the attention a member devotes to a team. We applied this framework to code the leadership strategies/best practices suggested in our focus groups for managing team member time and attentional resources along three-dimensions: attentional control, attentional stability, and attentional efficiency. Attentional control refers to directing a member's attention to the focal team amidst competing demands. Attentional stability involves sustaining attention on the focal team. Attentional efficiency is the efficient use of members' cognitive attentional resources. Our findings suggest that leaders play a crucial role in shaping the control, stability, and efficiency of team members' attention under competing demands. For example, one attentional control strategy is to focus members' attention on the team early on by agreeing on clear expectations and norms for participation. An attentional stability strategy is sustaining focus on the team through different types of informal communications that keep team members connected.  Finally, an example of attentional efficiency is using team members' time economically by implementing a core vs. extended team structure allowing certain members to participate only as needed. Our full presentation will provide more details and strategies.Our work advances team science research through a novel application of MTM and attention literature. We also highlight the critical role of leaders in helping members manage their multiteam memberships. As research teams continue to tackle complex problems, with members drawn in many different directions by their membership in multiple teams, our research provides a potential route for more productive, enjoyable, and effective teamwork.

Psychological Safety vs. Team Climate: Two different and Complementary Frameworks to Study Teamwork

Léa Rousseau

Abstract: Psychological safety and team climate are two frameworks commonly used to describe the strength of a team's working environment. Team psychological safety is defined as the shared belief that a team environment is safe for interpersonal risk taking, with members feeling there will not be negative consequences on their self-image, status, or career due to taking risks. Team climate is defined as the shared perceptions of politics, procedures, norms, attitudes, and expectations in a team environment. These two definitions are similar but not the same. Due to this, psychological safety and team climate as terms are often incorrectly applied.Both psychological safety and team climate have been primarily understood in the fields of organizational behaviour, applied psychology, and administrative science. However, they remain independent from one another, and no attempt has been made to reconcile the two frameworks. Considering the lack of formal integration of these concepts in the literature, our goal is to begin comparing psychological safety and team climate so that they are easy and clear to distinguish.Our intention is to provide a side-by-side comparison of the larger themes and approaches from team climate and psychological safety to highlight differences that we believe warrant further investigation and start the conversation around future integration of these ideas. We hope that this work will help people learning about team climate and psychological safety, and people who are already familiar with these ideas better distinguish between the two concepts.By separating the questions from the Team Climate Inventory into psychological safety's team behaviours and norms, we see that aspects of psychological safety are integrated into each of the facets of Team Climate. From the outside, participative safety, is defined as group settings where the interpersonal atmosphere is one of non-threatening trust and support (Anderson & West 1998), appears to be nearly identical to that of psychological safety. However, only 4 of the 8 questions identified as representing the participative safety facet of team climate are reflective of the shared team beliefs or team behaviours core to the concept of psychological safety.Psychological safety and team climate superficially appear to be quite similar. Both frameworks are used by organizations and researchers to describe the strength of a team environment, however, team climate focuses on how your team is working and how does your team work, while psychological safety focuses on how team members feel. Both highlight the importance that interpersonal relationships have on the team's working environment. In both psychological safety and team climate how team members understand each other and understand their team environment is clearly important, however when we begin to describe the context and organization of this understanding is when apparent differences are identified.

Exploring Entanglements between Team Competencies and Team Failures

Kennan Salinero

Abstract: In conjunction with the Education and Training Special Interest Group (SIG) in the International Network for Science of Team Science (INSciTS), led by Liz Ryder and Wayne McCormick, the proposers of this Lightning Talk formed a sub-group to dig more deeply into the role of competencies for productive teams. In reviewing the growing literature on skills for collaboration in the sciences, we were struck by the range and variety of lenses on competencies.  Different groups noted individual characteristics, predispositions, capabilities, habits of mind, and ‚Äò21st Century Skills', as well as the distinction between individual vs team competencies. Reviews also illuminated the role of nested systems (e.g., individual, team and learning systems) and productive pedagogies (for instance, epistemic living systems, service learning, and portfolios, to name a few).  However, during SIG meetings, discussants were struck by factors related not only to success but also to failure. The question at the heart of this Talk then arose. We asked ourselves whether failure is due to insufficient competence in pertinent capabilities (e.g., communication, reflectivity, competencies of fruition); or whether it might be due to structural elements including psychological safety, behavioral dynamics, and the affective domain? In our Lightning Talk we will review differing epistemologies of competencies and share lessons from failure that encourage a broader understanding of competencies.  Dena Fam and Michael O'Rourke's book of case studies on Interdisciplinary and Transdisciplinary Failures as Lessons Learned informed our initial thinking, along with our mindmap of the various lenses on competencies. We will discuss lessons from failure that acknowledge institutional dimensions, but will focus specifically on the role that emotion and trust play in processes of integration and collaboration. In doing so, we also treat difference as a resource, not an obstacle to overcome or avoid. We will center candor as crucial to moving away from a mentality of limits, the dangers of conformity and the tyranny of a priori norms that block creative thriving. We end by framing the overarching questions we hope will engage further discussion in the SciTS community.  To support engagement with our talk, we will share additional resources including a mind map of the various lenses on competencies and the references that have shaped our thinking. Finally, in order to learn from others, we invite creation of a companion "Choose Your Own Adventure" (CYOA). We envision guided inquiry regarding views on failure, including personal experiences.  This can lead into exploration of competencies that are unique vs those that transfer across various contexts including disciplines, interdisciplinary fields, transdisciplinary programs, occupational professions, and sectors in the academy, government and the military, as well as industry and civil society.

Librarians/Informationists as Transdisciplinary Team Members

Karen Liston

Abstract: Librarians (sometimes called Informationists, or information Scientists) are uniquely equipped and positioned to support and facilitate many aspects of transdisciplinary research teams' work.  Although most frequently included on teams conducting systematic reviews, Librarians are prepared to uniquely contribute at critical points in many research teams' work.  Librarians' backgrounds and training seldom match the disciplinary knowledge of other team members, but frequently span boundaries between the expertise that other team members uniquely contribute to collaborations.  Most subject specialist Librarians possess terminal masters degrees that use various components of social science techniques used in the study of library users and related phenomenon.  In recent years, these methods have expanded to include techniques such as digital humanities for analyzing texts and corpuses, and big data analytics for studying social media and impact measures.Reviews of the literature have been conducted to identify the many concrete ways that Librarians traditionally contribute to collaborative research endeavors.  The expanded approach of this study captures the additional roles, approaches, activities, and techniques that Librarians could offer as integral members of research teams. Topics explored include: Librarians' cross-disciplinary knowledge can help them lay bare the jargon and implicit knowledge that can arise as barriers to communication among disciplinary experts. Librarians are expert searchers, devising unique queries based on their knowledge of information structures and search methodologies. Librarians constantly ask questions to clarify researchers' needs. Their familiar positionality as non-expert members of the academic community make them safe, trusted and  strategic partners in clearly asking questions, and eliciting and synthesizing answers in terms that are understandable to the layman. Librarians frequently span academic, public, and inter-institutional spheres, and can  surface queries and concepts that are strategic when they intersect these sometimes  disparate worlds. Because of their historic service role, Librarians are overlooked as ongoing collaborative research partners, designers, and disseminators. Exploiting and expanding Librarians' existing roles could benefit research collaborations.  By better understanding existing and potentially expanded roles, Librarians' skills and approaches could be identified for further development in Librarians' formal and organizational training to benefit transdisciplinary team science research endeavors.

Team Formation and Team Performance: The Balance Between Team Freshness and Repeat Collaboration

Meijun Liu

Abstract: Incorporating fresh members in teams is considered a pathway to team creativity. However, whether freshness improves team performance or not remains unclear, as well as the optimal involvement of fresh members for team performance. This study uses a group of authors on the byline of a publication as a proxy for a scientific team. We extend an indicator, i.e., team freshness, to measure the extent to which a scientific team incorporates new members, by calculating the fraction of new collaboration relations established within the team. Based on more than 43 million scientific publications covering more than a half-century of research from Microsoft Academic Graph, this study provides a holistic picture of the current development of team freshness by outlining the temporal evolution of freshness, and its disciplinary distribution. Subsequently, using a multivariable regression approach, we examine the association between team freshness and papers' short-term and long-term citations. The major findings are as follows: (1) team freshness in scientific teams has been increasing in the past half-century; (2) there exists an inverted-U-shaped association between team freshness and papers' citations in all the disciplines and in different periods; (3) the inverted-U-shaped relationship between team freshness and papers' citations is only found in small teams, while, in large teams, team freshness is significantly positively related to papers' citations.