Complexity in Collaboration: Developing an Understanding of Macrocognition in Teams through Examination of Task Complexity

Abstract

How individuals and teams work together to plan, think, decide, and solve problems has been of increasing interest to researchers within the past decade. Specifically, collaborative aspects of macrocognition such as knowledge construction, collaborative team problem solving, team consensus, and outcome evaluation and revision are moving to the forefront of team research. Critical to our overall goal of improving collaboration, is an understanding of how the nature of the task interacts with team problem solving. Therefore, in this paper we focus on task complexity and discuss how it can potentially be operationalized and examined to better understand how it can impact collaboration.