Enhancing collaborative interactions between diverse team members

Highly pressured working environments can provide a challenging context for collaboration, especially where teams of diverse individuals are formed to tackle short-term projects. Hence, this Ph.D. thesis presents research which explores how to prepare individuals before they meet, so that a group of diverse team members working together for the first time can establish common ground easily and begin to interact collaboratively. The thesis research adopted a user-centred, qualitative approach to gain a deep understanding of the various challenges, motivations, and strategies for the collaborative interactions experienced by group members. A semi-structured interview was conducted with ten deep-level diverse participants who represented challenging cases of working in a group in a university context. As a result, three concepts were proposed to understand the enablers of, and barriers to, collaboration – “red areas,” “green areas,” and “interaction strategies.” These concepts were explored further through a series of workshops conducted in two different countries, the United Kingdom (UK) and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), involving more than 70 participants from industry and academia. Consequently, seven design concepts were proposed: We-spirit, Universal, Compassion, Expectations, Empowerment, Development, and Protection. These concepts were employed to suggest a new social-networking technology design based on an anonymous group profile, which group members can use to establish common ground and enhance collaborative interactions. Two studies of real case scenarios with deep-level diverse groups at universities in the UK and KSA were conducted to evaluate the concept of an anonymous group profile. The findings of these studies were implemented through the suggested design. In this thesis, different studies provided comprehensive data that were analysed thoroughly to offer a set of contributions. First, this thesis provides insight into the period before the collaborative work starts, which needs more exploration than that conducted in previous research. Second, it provides a deep understanding of the diverse challenges, motivations, and strategies experienced by team members. Finally, it proposes a future design for social-networking technology for a group of members, to aid collaborative interactions through an anonymous group profile