Multiple Task Performance in Collaboration

Principal Investigators: Sara Kiesler (Carnegie Mellon University), Susan Fussell (Carnegie Mellon University), Dan Siewiorek (Carnegie Mellon University), Suzanne Weisband (University of Arizona), Sherry Thatcher (University of Arizona)

NSF Award #IIS 0329077

As productivity in knowledge organizations has risen, the quantity of responsibilities and the relationships of professional workers have likewise increased. People work on multiple projects with multiple colleagues. Because of the complex interdependencies among workers and projects, overload and interruption on any one task can have a cascading negative effect across the entire organization. This multidisciplinary project by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University and University of Arizona addresses the processes of managing interdependencies in complex collaborations. The project combines field studies in a police department and a professional service organization, laboratory studies of how people allocate resources and organize their work, and development of computer models of real-time multiple task collaborative performance.

Multitasking effects and distance. Susan Fussell, Sara Kiesler, Suzanne Weisband, Peter Scupelli, and Leslie Setlock are conducting laboratory studies of the effects of distance on managing multiple projects. We have discovered that when people are engaged in two separate tasks with separate partners, they will tend to favor tasks with nearby collaborators.

Peter Scupelli has designed a new instant messaging tool that provides coworkers with information about people’s task activities. Ray Chen developed, iterated, and prototyped the new IM tool, ProjectVu IM. Peter Scupelli created a new “Detective Crime Solving” task adapted from information sharing experiments, the game, Clue, and police procedurals in books and TV shows. The subject plays a detective who has to work with a partner to solve a crime and narrow down the list of suspects to one prime suspect. Each pair receives documents from witness interviews, the coroner, etc. The pairs must put their information together to solve the problem. Coming soon, results of new experiments.

Fussell, S. R., Kiesler, S., Setlock, L. D., Scupelli, P., & Weisband, S. (2004). Effects of Instant Messaging on the management of multiple project trajectories. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Computer Interaction. CHI ’04. (pp. 191). April 23-30, Vienna

	Project-View IM (P-VIM) plugin
	regular Trillian IM client

Cross cultural effects in collaboration. As new communications media foster international collaborations, we would be remiss in overlooking cultural differences when assessing them. In this study (see 4 above), 24 pairs in three cultural groupings—American-American (AA), Chinese-Chinese (CC) and American-Chinese (AC) –worked on two decision-making tasks, one face-to-face and the other via IM. Drawing upon prior research, we predicted differences in conversational efficiency, conversational content, interaction quality, persuasion, and performance. The quantitative results combined with conversation analysis suggest that the groups viewed the task differently—AA pairs as an exercise in situation-specific compromise; CC as consensus-reaching. Cultural differences were reduced but not eliminated in the IM condition.

Setlock, L., Fussell, S. R. & Neuwirth, C. (in press). Taking it out of context: Collaborating within and across cultures in face-to-face settings and via instant messaging. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW 04. Nov. 6 – 10, Chicago, Ill.

Leslie Setlock and her coauthors used Adam Kramer’s cool text analysis tool in their study.