Effects of Team Facilitation

Many teams are confronted with having generated many more ideas during a brainstorming activity than they can meaningfully consider in detail. In order to achieve the task goal (e.g. solve a problem or make a decision), they need to focus their attention on a limited number of these ideas. This is accomplished during convergence in which teams concentrate on reducing and clarifying a list of generated ideas. However, teams often face challenges related to their collaboration process. They can make use of professional facilitators that provide knowledge on effective meeting management, handle group dynamics, and support the adequate use of technology. Past research showed that facilitation can have positive effects on team outcomes, such as satisfaction, team mental models, or quality of outcome. However, findings are inhomogeneous, which leaves the concept of facilitation and its components poorly understood. The consideration of team processes might help to better explain the effects of facilitation as facilitation neutrally contributes to a teams processes by enhancing communication and information processing. However, until now the mediating role of team processes in facilitated settings has yet not been sufficiently established. My research project addresses this gap in literature and focuses on facilitated, IT-supported teams performing problem-solving and decision-making tasks during face-to-face meetings. The aim of this research project is to theorize on the components of facilitation, i.e. attention guidance and discussion allowance, and their relations to team processes and team outcomes. To validate the components of facilitation that were identified in our previous work, I will collect data of facilitated business meetings in the field. Moreover, I will statistically test the mediating effects of team processes on outcomes on the basis of data collected in a laboratory experiment. I plan to conduct this research at the Center for Collaboration Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Dr. Gert-Jan de Vreede is the managing director of the Center for Collaboration Science and a well-established researcher in the domains of facilitation, crowdsourcing, and collaboration engineering. This one-year research stay would enable us to advance in our theorizing on facilitation and allow me to acquire know-how from one of the top researchers in my research domain.

No additional funding sources recorded.