Interference Management Mechanisms and Socio-cognitive Constructs in Cooperative Relationships

Collaboration tools are increasingly being used to allow distributed agents/individuals or teams to interact effectively to perform some tasks and achieve some goals. There have been many research efforts in providing comprehensive treatment of cooperation in teams or socio-technical systems. With a multi-disciplinary approach based on human factors research, organization studies, and artificial intelligence findings, this paper offers a conceptual framework in which cooperation and other social relationships can be defined in terms of the fundamental concepts of goal fit, intentionality, motivation, interference, and dependence. It is shown that social relationships are established and sustained by means of particular interaction mechanisms used for interference management, as well as socio-cognitive constructs that emerge from and feed these interactions. This framework can be used to determine the level of cooperation between different individuals or teams for a given task and therefore be used to better inform the requirements of the collaborative tools designed for them.