Collaborative Interaction: Review of Communication Scholarship and a Research Agenda

It appears that collaborative interaction is nearly everywhere, including our dyadic relationships, our schools, our doctors offices, our workplaces, and our local and international communities. Furthermore, mounting evidence points to the conclusion that collaborative interaction has great promise as a tool across contexts. Unfortunately, despite the growing use and recognition of effective collaboration, very little synthesis exists across various domains of literature about how collaborative interaction works and its critical components. This chapter serves as a means to examine these disparate sets of literature, with an eye toward creating synthesis across the various domains. This chapter reviews 80 sources published within the last decade that concern collaboration in various contexts, including developmental/learning, interpersonal relationships, conflict, group problem solving and decision making, health (spanning the micro-macro range from doctor-patient communication, health-care teams, and community health alliances), community groups, and interprofessional and interorganizational settings. Themes found across the literature, as well as definitional issues related to key constructs, are developed and discussed. Finally, a descriptive and heuristic model of collaborative interaction is presented that encompasses the key features and issues raised in the review. Research and theory-building agendas are also offered to stimulate more investigations of this phenomenon.