Collaboration Cost

Here are excerpts from interview with Keyvan Vakili of London Business School:

"Certain costs of collaboration are well understood; including coordination issues, time and language barriers, maintaining commitment at the team level, and the ever-present danger of group think."

"... for a typical paper with two collaborators, each individual was on average awarded around 80% of the credit for writing the paper. They weren’t each getting 50%, as one would expect. In other words, every author was being significantly over-recognised for their contribution.”

"...because of the difficulty in uncoupling individual input from collective output, it can skew the real value of an employee’s contribution to a project, making it virtually impossible to assess its worth accurately.

"...the rewards associated with collaboration are potentially so great that people are increasingly motivated to sign up to projects, regardless of how much value they can actually bring. And that can impact outcomes, as well as return on investment.^[e4fbbf]

Footnote

[e4fbbf] 2021, Jul. Is there a hidden cost to collaboration? London Business School.