The feasibility of interdisciplinary teams

Abstract

The concern of the present essay is with the number of times inter­ disciplinarity has been suggested recently as a panacea to complex problems without documentation of the factors that could undermine its apparent value. The aim of the essay was to establish a feasibility model for interdisciplinary teams which would enable the research manager to make an informed decision about the appropriateness of this style of operation to the problem at hand. After establishing the organizational approaches which would reduce the unproductive forces in interdisciplinary teams, four such teams were interviewed to gain an impression of the degree of ease with which these approaches could be implemented and the effectiveness associated with their implementation. From this data an impressionistic feasibility model was developed. The model asserts that the greater the breadth of the task and size of the team, the greater the allocation of resources to interdisciplinary acculturation needs to be for the team to be effective. Because of the high costs of interdisciplinary acculturation today and the lack of insight into the need to allocate resources to this process in three of the four teams, the model recommends that the feasibility of interdisciplinarity today increases as the size of the team and breadth of the task falls. Quantitative operations research is needed to refine this model but cannot be anticipated until interdisciplinary teams are well enough established for the variables involved to be more clearly defined. Show more