Collaboration

Group paper collaboration part Qianwen Song

Effective communication can lay a good foundation to collaboration, because communication can build a mutual understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each team member. However, only communication is far from enough, there are some other essential elements in the process of disciplined collaboration, such as identity, empathy and convergent and divergent thinking.

Not all the problems in the teamwork need to be solved by collaboration. Sometimes, blindly collaboration slows down a process or task because too many people try and contribute, but there are no defined roles in the effort. Therefore, leaders of many organizations need to know when to collaborate, and in which areas, and when note to collaborate. After understanding the case for collaboration and evaluating the upside for the company, leaders should articulate a decision rule for when to and when not do the collaboration. Collaboration happens when the end product or service will benefit from the whole process which means the organizations can get collaboration premium in the end. Expect the return of collaboration on project; managers need to take into consideration two additional costs. People should launch a collaboration project only is the net value of collaboration is greater that the return minus both opportunity costs and collaboration costs (T. Hansen, 2009). Considering the opportunity costs are relatively fixed, the job of a leader is to drive collaboration costs down to nearly zero in order to carry out the disciplined collaboration smoothly.

To ensure the process of collaboration, diversity is a necessary element. There will not be any improvement without disagreement and modification, so if a team wants to create a good idea or solution, it must have several optional choices. The team members with different backgrounds, ethnicities, gender or age hold different views with the same problem, which offer the team a...