Assessing Collaboration Within and Between Teams: A Multiteam Systems Perspective

Developing assessment methods that capture an individual’s capability to collaborate can look to the team and multiteam systems literature, which identifies six critical components of collaboration. These six include team affect/motivation, team interaction processes, and team cognition, as well as corresponding constructs at the system level, multiteam affect/motivation, between-team interaction, and multiteam cognition. This chapter defines and distinguishes teams and multiteam systems and discusses the importance of that distinction for assessing individual collaborative capacity in both small stand-alone teams and larger systems of teams working toward superordinate goals. Particularly, we describe confluent and countervailing forces—the notion that what enables team functioning and effectiveness may or may not also enable the multiteam system effectiveness. Assessments of individual contributions to team and multiteam dynamics must consider the implications to functioning both within and between teams.