Collaborative research for academic knowledge creation: How team characteristics, motivation, and processes influence research impact

Abstract

Contending that collaboration management practices and interpersonal relationships are the main factors in successful collaboration in R&D, scholars have turned their attention to the relationships between collaborators. Internal factors in research collaboration activities are not yet understood at the team level. They are the so-called black box of collaboration study. The purpose of this paper is to empirically demonstrate how factors relating to team characteristics, motivation, and processes influence research impact. The study works from a multi-theoretical perspective, extending from behavioral science to general management study, and seeks to answer the question: How should we organize and manage a collaborative team to improve its research impact? The empirical results show that, along with previously identified qualitative and quantitative factors, input factors such as: project motivation, transformational leadership, frequent face-to-face communication, more outsourcing, more attentional resource, and more evenly distributed workload improve research impact.