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Teams vs Organizations: The Balance of Interests in Large-scale Science

This presentation explores the importance of organizational settings in team science initiatives, focusing on the national labs as a prominent example. It highlights the impact of personnel, security, and resource allocation on collaboration processes and offers lessons for evaluating knowledge production initiatives.

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Teams vs Organizations: The Balance of Interests in Large-scale Science

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  1. Teams vs Organizations: The Balance of Interests in Large-scale Science Jonathon Mote, Southern Illinois University Presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Evaluation Association October 2012 This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation through the Science of Science Policy program. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author.

  2. Research Background • Arises from a long-standing U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Basic Energy Sciences interest in understanding and developing tools to assess key factors in the research environment that foster excellence in order to improve performance. • Recent NSF grant in Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) has allowed us to expand into other national labs and organizations. • NSF project utilized the “research project” as the unit of analysis • Assumed to be stable and concrete, but proved to be highly malleable across organizational contexts

  3. Science of Team Science • Relatively new field • Predicated on a growth of team science • Increasing “dominance”? (Wuchty et al, 2007) • Explore attributes of team initiatives and scientific teams • Size, complexity, composition, goals, scope et al • Initiatives tend to be large, directed efforts at promoting cross-disciplinary integration • Different from “invisible college” notion?

  4. Evaluating Science of Team Science • Different from traditional evaluative criteria • Originality, rigor and quantity of output • Two primary criteria for TS (Stokolset al, 2006) • Quality and scope of cross-disciplinary integration – resulting in new models and research strategies • Impact of scientific products – new and improved avenues of research, training, applications, policy and health outcomes

  5. Evaluating Team Science • Six primary categories of contextual factors influencing TS effectiveness (Stokols et al 2006) • Interpersonal • Intrapersonal • Physical environment • Societal/Political • Technological • Organizational • Presence of strong org incentives to collaborate, non-hierarchical structures, breadth of disciplinary perspectives, org climate of sharing, opportunities for face-to-face communication

  6. What is the “Organizational” in TS? • Focused primarily on organization of the “team” • Very little exploration of the organizational settings for team members • Does it matter? • TS is about collaboration – need for task interdependence (Cummings and Keisler, 2011), resource interdependence and goal congruency (Boardman and Ponomariov, 2011), among others • Organizational settings of team members can interfere with collaboration processes • Think of a gluetrap – how sticky are the organizations?

  7. National Labs in the TS Context • The primary locations of “big” science in the U.S. • Big problems, big equipment and big (internal) teams • Location of a number of prominent TS initiatives • ANSER – Argonne-Northwestern Solar Energy Research Center • National labs as the epitome of organizational context (and challenges) for TS • Range of size/complexity across the 17 national labs

  8. Three Organizational Areas of Concern • Personnel • Rewards/incentives still organizational • Career paths (especially for junior) not always conducive to TS (Rhoten and Parker, 2004) • Security • Continuum of security across labs (OpSec aware!) • Reduces permeability (both in and out) • Resource Allocation • Funding determines task interdependency • High levels of overhead • Difficulty of mixing funding streams

  9. Lessons for Evaluation of TS (and similar Knowledge Production Initiatives) • TS is increasing – growth in resources encouraging cross- and inter-disciplinary efforts • Evaluation must take into account not only the organization of TS efforts, but the organizational settings of TS researchers • Forces of parochialism in some organizations are quite strong – inhibit the impact of TS efforts

  10. Contact Information Jonathan Mote Jmote@socy.umd.edu 301-405-9746 Jerry Hage HAGE@socy.umd.edu 301-405-6437 We welcome comments, suggestions

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