INTRODUCTION

If today’s job advertisements are anything to go by, the ability to work together is a highly sought-after skill. Employers from all conceivable professions seem to constantly be on the lookout for collaborative team players who can fit right into different employee groups, teams and other constellations. It doesn’t seem to matter if you are a car mechanic, programmer, teacher or a truck driver. The ability to collaborate with others is evidently considered an asset in virtually all professions.

It is perhaps not so surprising that the ability to work together is so highly valued. Many workplaces are so large that it is necessary to organise employees into smaller departments and groups where they work together. On top of that, some tasks and assignments are so extensive and complex that they require input from more than one person. By collaborating with others, we are able to handle challenges and projects that none of us would be able to deal with on our own. This does, however, presuppose that we can and want to collaborate with others.

This book is specifically about the collaborations that take place at work, but that doesn’t mean it’s only at work we humans collaborate with one another. We participate in group work at school, practice team sports in our free time, play computer games over the internet and engage in many activities that require us to interact and communicate with others in order to achieve things together. In essence we humans seem to be rather inclined to collaborate with each other in most things we do.

Not all collaborations, however, are as successful as hoped. It is not uncommon for collective efforts to be perceived as inefficient, demanding or even energydraining. How well a collaboration works, and how it is experienced by the people who participate in it, can be affected by many different factors. The reality is a lot of things need to fall into place if a collaboration is to work effectively. Fortunately for us, collaboration is a relatively well-studied phenomenon, and there is a lot of knowledge about what makes collaborations work well (and conversely why they also fail). The idea behind this book is to summarise some of this knowledge, and relate it to our working lives in a way that can hopefully be useful to you.

Just like other books in the ‘Little Book’ series, this format does not allow for a comprehensive compilation of all the studies on this subject conducted over the years. My aim, however, has been to base each chapter on an essential part of the research devoted to each chapter’s theme. At the end of each chapter you’ll find a list of references to the scientific sources on which the chapter’s content is based. This will hopefully be useful for those of you who might want to study the subject in greater depth. With all this said, my ambition is that this book achieves a balance between being easily absorbable yet still a relatively illuminating introduction to the subject of collaboration.