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Collaboration remains a central aspect of contemporary work and a source of emergent barriers that hinder team success. Scholarship has identified the breadth of barriers teams can face when working together and recognizes barriers as interdependent. This paper builds on this scholarship to address the types of relationships barriers can have as they interact across levels of analysis to affect teams. We draw on qualitative interview data with scientific teams to explore relationships among barriers stemming from teams’ internal processes and context. We identify common relationship patterns among barriers that can be used as a framework for analyzing complex, multi-level barrier systems affecting team outcomes. Our data highlight the importance of considering longitudinal, strategic support for targeting cross-barrier interactions when seeking to intervene in collaborations. This framework has practical application in supporting teams and creating policies that support collaborative work.

 

The future of work will be measured. The increasing and widespread adoption of analytics, the use of digital inputs and outputs to inform organizational decision making, makes the communication of data central to organizing. This article applies and extends signaling theory to provide a framework for the study of analytics as communication. We report three cases that offer examples of dubious, selective, and ambiguous signaling in the activities of workers seeking to shape the meaning of data within the practice of analytics. The analysis casts the future of work as a game of strategic moves between organizations, seeking to measure behaviors and quantify the performance of work, and workers, altering their behavioral signaling to meet situated goals. The framework developed offers a guide for future examinations of the asymmetric relationship between management and workers as organizations adopt metrics to monitor and evaluate work.

 

Bioinspired design (BID) is an interdisciplinary research field that can lead to innovations to solve technical problems. There have been many attempts to develop a framework to de-silo engineering and biology and implement processes to enable BID. In January of 2022, we organized a symposium at the 2022 Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting to bring together educators and practitioners of BID. The symposium aimed to (a) consolidate best practices in teaching bioinspiration, (b) create and sustain effective multidisciplinary teams, (c) summarize best approaches to conduct problem-based or solution-driven fundamental research, and (d) bring BID innovations to market. During the symposium, several themes emerged. Here we highlight three critical themes that need to be addressed for BID to become a truly interdisciplinary strategy that benefits all stakeholders and results in innovation. First, there is a need for a usable methodology that leads to proper abstraction of biological principles for engineering design. Second, the utilization of engineering models to test biological hypotheses is essential for the continued engagement of biologists in BID. Third, there is a necessity of proven team-science strategies that will lead to successful collaborations between engineers and biologists. Accompanying this introduction is a variety of perspectives and research articles highlighting best practices in BID research and product development and guides that can highlight the challenges and facilitate interdisciplinary collaborations in the field of BID.

 

Bioinspired design (BID) is an inherently interdisciplinary practice that connects fundamental biological knowledge with the capabilities of engineering solutions. This paper discusses common social challenges inherent to interdisciplinary research, and specific to collaborating across the disciplines of biology and engineering when practicing BID. We also surface best practices that members of the community have identified to help address these challenges. To accomplish this goal, we address challenges of bioinspiration through a lens of recent findings within the social scientific study of interdisciplinary teams. We propose three challenges faced in BID: (1) complex motivations across collaborating researchers, (2) misperceptions of relationships and benefits between biologists and engineers, and (3) institutionalized barriers that disincentivize interdisciplinary work. We advance specific recommendations for addressing each of these challenges.

 

Current studies of diversity in teams and organizations highlight the importance of examining activated, rather than just dormant, differences on a team. In this study, we contribute to organizational diversity theories by arguing that the activation of differences is a communicative process whereby how teams talk about their differences matters in how the activated differences affect team outcomes. Drawing on an in-depth qualitative study of real-life scientific teams, we examine the relationship between how team members activate and frame differences and how those communicative frames affect the team’s collective work. We find that how teams frame their differences affects the relationship between activated differences and team outcomes. We give practical and theoretical recommendations for the communicative management of differences on teams and in organizations.

 

Diverse teams may potentiate greater creativity through divergent thinking. Yet research suggests these teams face a dilemma: the very features that make them promising are associated with persistent communication challenges that threaten their effectiveness. We turn to the literature on dialectical tensions to argue that a process of oscillation, consisting of repeated alternation between moments of divergence, emphasizing the differentiation of perspectives, and moments of convergence, emphasizing integrating ideas to produce coordination, may mobilize the tension between differentiation and integration effectively. We explore the utility of our framework by applying it to the experiences of a diverse cohort of researchers who engaged in a purposefully designed oscillatory process to generate research projects related to climate resilience. Our multimethod evaluation of this case indicates that oscillation was effective for creative idea generation. This work contributes to both practice and scholarship in interdisciplinary teamwork support, creativity, and organizations.