Assessing Coordination in Human Groups: Concepts and Methods
This integrating chapter summarises different coordination constructs and methods for assessment in human group research. Because of the oversized number of coordination constructs, they are clustered along first-order variables of coordination, such as i
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Assessing Coordination in Human Groups: Concepts and Methods Thomas Ellwart
Abstract This integrating chapter summarises different coordination constructs and methods for assessment in human group research. Because of the oversized number of coordination constructs, they are clustered along first-order variables of coordination, such as impersonal coordination instruments, personal coordination, tacit behaviours, team knowledge, team attitudes, and coordination as outcome. This overview is grounded in both a functional and temporal perspective of coordination and offers a pattern of orientation in the variety of coordination variables. The second part of this chapter introduces methodological streams to be found in the research for assessing group coordination in the laboratory and the field and will refer to authors of Part II in this book to give an outlook for the following chapters.
7.1
Introduction
The aim of Part II of this book is to give insights into the concepts and methods of human group coordination in the social sciences. The reader will find chapters that focus on variables such as coordination potential (Chap. 8), shared mental models and team knowledge (Chaps. 9 and 10), and methods such as micro-analyses for measuring different coordination mechanisms (Chap. 11). The following overview structures different conceptual and methodological approaches to coordination into a single comprehensive classification. The taxonomy offered in this integrating chapter does not represent a theoretical or functional model of coordination processes (cf. Chaps. 2 and 4) but does offer a pattern of orientation in the variety of coordination variables. Since specific concepts of coordination and methods of assessment are covered in detail in this volume, this chapter will merely summarise and highlight the essentials.
T. Ellwart University of Trier, Department of Economic Psychology, D-54286 Trier, Germany e-mail: [email protected]
M. Boos et al. (eds.), Coordination in Human and Primate Groups, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-15355-6_7, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
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T. Ellwart
This integrating chapter is divided into two parts. The first part (Sect. 2, “Perspectives on Coordination in Human Group Research”) defines the framework of the taxonomy, which is based on influential models of human group coordination (e.g. Arrow et al. 2000; Espinosa et al. 2004; Tschan 2000 and Chap. 6; Wittenbaum et al. 1998). This perspective classification is grounded in both a functional and temporal view of coordination (cf. Arrow et al. 2000; McGrath and Tschan 2004; Wittenbaum et al. 1998) and distinguishes first-order variables of coordination according to three dimensions: (1) coordination as a process or as an outcome variable; (2) a temporal focus on coordination as pre-, in-, and post-processes; and (3) coordination as explicit or implicit coordination processes. Throughout the text, examples from the chapters in Part II are included in order to integrate their presented concepts into the coordination taxon
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