Team’s diversity and interpersonal skills: are they the magic ingredients in successful collaborative ecological research?

A high performance of an individual researcher or a research team is of course a much-desired quality in an academic society today. We all want to produce a good science and of course, present the good side of our personality. It looks like Cheruvelil et al. 2014 might have a recipe for ecologist to achieve such excellence as a team. They suggest that success can be achieved by mixing two magic ingredients: team diversity and great interpersonal skills. They adopt this recipe from the business sectors, education and “science of team science”. They believe that such recipe should make great products in ecology too.
The topic is indeed interesting (well, if it wouldn’t, why would we even pick up this paper), but is it really so that diversity and interpersonal skills are the magic ingredients that will change how teams in ecology collaborate and perform?
As a highly collaborative team, we believe that a successful team should agree on their opinions, so during our journal club discussion we agreed that diversity and interpersonal skills might work their magic, but only under certain conditions. The magic, in our opinion, is very much team or group and a context dependent. We also point out that not all researchers in ecology or in other disciplines might need collaboration to be a successful researcher.
Let us start with the diversity component. We agree with the authors that team’s diversity is important, but we disagree that increasing teams diversity alone is going to make team performance good. Indeed, we think authors employ slightly over-simplistic view of team diversity. While we completely agree that is a great experience to work in team build from different career stage researcher, cultural backgrounds etc., we don’t see this as an absolute requirement to ensure teams productivity. In our view, the only reason why ecological or any teams for that mater, are build is a unifying theme or a question. Thus, such group might be composed from very diverse members, but the most important factor for such group’s success would be the unifying element and expertise to contribute to such a unifying topic. We believe that if an common interest, a vision and a critical mass in a topic to carry out a task is missing in an ecological group, diversity alone will not diminish a risk of such a group becoming a pseudo one. Indeed, in the paper despite their advocacy in group’s diversity, authors warn that if group becomes too diverse it might risk becoming unproductive and that a diverse group should not loose the critical mass.
Another magic ingredient authors suggest for a great performance is team interpersonal skills. Again as for a team’s diversity good interpersonal skills are important, but are not necessary crucial, especially if team is build only for a specific project. We think that authors do not make a clear distinction or really explore the difference between long-term stable teams and short-term project based teams. In our opinion, the different is quite essential. Imagine, you decide to write a manuscript on a certain topic and you need the expertise of different people, possible from different fields. How would you select people for such work? Would you select people based on how good interpersonal skills they have or on how good experts they are? Well, we think it goes without saying, with certain exceptions, that the most logical approach would be to select people based on their ability to contribute to the project with their expertise and not on based how well they master interpersonal skills. Of course, the story is different if we are talking about long-term research groups. In such case, one we would pay much more attention to peoples’ interpersonal skills and if such are weak or not existent it definitely makes a lot of sense to cultivate them. In summary, we agree with the authors that interpersonal skills can improve team efficiency and productivity and make everyone’s life beautiful at work, but only in long-term stable teams with well-defined vision and goals.
One thing we found rather puzzling in this paper is the emphasis on reducing the hierarchy in team structure. Instead of hierarchy authors emphasize interactions between different members. We can see the logic and benefits behind such suggestion, but if we are to build the diverse teams there should be someone drawing a common vision for a team and gluing team members together. Somewhat authors touch upon this matter in their paper, saying that there should be a person that “cross-fertilize ideas”, but then they state that interaction mode would be more efficient. We believe that someone needs to manage a team otherwise ideas will remain scattered.
We think authors should also have touched upon one important aspects of research life; a researcher can achieve a high level of productivity when working alone and some researchers might even find intensive collaboration counterproductive. Indeed in Figure 1 of the paper if you add up all individual performances, the sum of individual performances will be equal or perhaps even higher than high-performing collaborative groups; just an interesting point in our opinion that authors haven’t really addressed. It is rather clear to us that the team collaboration is a context dependent. For example, not all PhD students even require collaborations in their projects or at least no more than collaboration with their advisor. Certainly in other cases, collaboration might significantly improve a researcher’s success. Thus, a need for collaboration is usually associated with your career stage and what type of project you are involved too.

Overall, we think that Cheruvelil et al. 2014 touch upon an interesting and rarely discussed topic in many research groups. However, we feel the contribution could have been greater if the authors would have examined scientific literature in social sciences or psychology examining group dynamics and then explored how such theories could be applied to different ecological fields. We felt at that some of the proposed business models are not necessarily relevant in ecological teams. We believe that interpersonal skills and team diversity in will play an important role in ecological teams success, but only under certain conditions.
Despite some of the difference in the points of view between our journal club team and the authors of the paper discussed, we are excited to try some of the team building exercise suggested in our next team-building meeting.

The paper discussed and cited:
Kendra S Cheruvelil, Patricia A Soranno, Kathleen C Weathers, Paul C Hanson, Simon J Goring, Christopher T Filstrup, and Emily K Read 2014. Creating and maintaining high-performing collaborative research teams: the importance of diversity and interpersonal skills. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12: 31–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1890/130001