Cognitive Model of Team Collaboration: Macro-Cognitive Focus

The purpose of this paper is to describe a cognitive model of team collaboration emphasizing the human decision-making processes used during team collaboration. The descriptive model includes the domain characteristics, collaboration stages, meta- and macro cognitive processes and the mechanisms for achieving the stages and cognitive processes. Two experiments were designed to provide empirical data on the validity of the collaboration stages and cognitive processes of the model. Both face-to-face and asynchronous, distributed teams demonstrated behavior that supports the existence of the collaboration stages along with seven cognitive processes.