How can the study of cognition – specifically integrative complexity – affect our understanding of effective interdepartmental collaboration?

When Individuals need to collaborate across departmental lines to achieve otherwise unattainable goals, the collaborators have the incentive to be receptive to the needs of all involved. That receptivity is higher in those who are integratively complex. Until recently, the literature generally agreed that a person’s ability to make informed decisions based on assimilating a broad range of (or complex) perspectives led to better outcomes than in situations relying on a narrow (or simple) perspective.

Tetlock, Peterson, & Berry (1993) delved into the dichotomous nature of integratively complex & simple dispositions that people have. They linked weaknesses underlying the positive attributes that being complex often conveys.

For example, integratively complex individuals tend to be excessively receptive to competing points of view which often leads to being unable to make decisions. The corollary is that these individuals exhibit disagreeableness. This singular fact has ramifications on the success of collaborations. Disagreeableness can undermine a collaboration’s success.

The question we would like to explore is whether the disagreeableness that lurks behind integratively complex dispositions impedes collaborations’ performance. With Weick’s advice in mind, academic research provides a microcosm to investigate the complexity and disagreeableness in a collaborative setting. The nature of academic research – particularly in social sciences – with its overarching complexity requires that researchers have the ability to assimilate, evaluate, and integrate broad views on many phenomena. Simultaneously, academics have a long history of collaborating when creating new knowledge, which is exemplified by researchers sharing authorship on published papers. Disagreeableness has the propensity to undermine collaboration and the combinatorial power of integratively complex approach to generating new knowledge.

Therefore we posit that:
H1 – Published social scientists demonstrate integratively complex cognitive abilities.
H2 – Social scientists whose disagreeableness overpowers the benefits of collaboration (i.e. authors papers alone) will publish papers cited less frequently than those who can collaborate across disciplinary boundaries.

Methods:
Mining Google scholar and EBSCOhost:
We would select a set of social science journals to form our core data set.

To address H1:
From that set we would look at the reference sections and gauge the level of interdisciplinary works drawn upon to establish the author(s) level of integrative complexity. We could build a index from the number of citations in the paper and their distance from the journal topic. That would establish whether researchers are complex or not.

To address H2:
We would collect the number of authors per paper and interdiscplinary range over a given period in a select set of social science journals. We would then compare the number of authors of each paper to the number of subsequent citations for each paper to gauge its comparative success.