Hi, my name is Denise Reyes. I live in Houston Texas and I’m a doctoral candidate at Rice University studying industrial/organizational psychology with a specialization in teams, leadership, and training. One key to successful collaboration that I’ve found to be important both in my research and personal experience working in teams is to have a team made up of individuals with complementary skills. Especially with the complex problems that we are trying to solve today, you need expertise in many different areas, and that’s just not possible for one person to hold.However, one challenge that you can find by working with people from different backgrounds, is that you might have different goals. For example, when I work with engineering professors, it’s more helpful for them to publish in engineering journals, whereas I’d prefer to publish in psychology journals.  To make sure that we can succeed in our collaboration, we have to make sure that we have goals that align. A great way to make both parties happy in this case is to search for an interdisciplinary journal, or make an agreement to focus on one person’s goal and then the others.

I’ve also found that my most successful collaborations are with those who share a passion toward the same goal. When one person clearly cares more about a project than the other, I’ve noticed that social loafing can sometimes occur. Social loafing is when a person on a team exerts less effort on a task in a group setting because others can pick up their slack. When this happens, it hurts the overall team and those who really care about the project might end up feeling really frustrated and in the worst-case scenario, decide to give up on the project as a whole. However, when you meet people who are equally passionate about the project, it helps build team morale and fosters creativity. The way that I’ve picked up on someone’s interest in a project is when I have an initial meeting with them over coffee to share research ideas and then we find ourselves bouncing ideas off each other and getting excited about a potential project to work on together. Collaborations that have started out that way have been my most enjoyable and successful collaborations.

I have had similar experiences when collaborating.  It is very interesting how a group of people often match each others level of enthusiasm for a project.  I have  experienced this going both ways; either motivated individuals are able to elevate the group leading to a successful collaboration or the loafers end up disrupting the project by lowering the standards for the whole group. 

Another aspect of collaboration that is often overlooked is working independently. In the past I have worked on projects that involved editing video with after effects.  It was great to be able to get feedback and ideas from teammates.  But at the end of day I preferred to do the editing independently because people often have very different approaches to how they organise a project file.  It made the process easier because I knew where everything was. At the end I could mentally keep track of what was completed and what was still unfinished.  So I think it is necessary to identify what parts of a project benefit from working in a group and what parts need to be broken up so individuals are better able to tackle them.  This supports Reyes point that groups of people with complementary skills are able to progress the most through collaboration.