Issues in the Design of Facilitated Collaboration Processes

Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten (), Mariëlle Hengst-Bruggeling () and Gert-Jan Vreede ()
Additional contact information
Gwendolyn L. Kolfschoten: Delft University of Technology
Mariëlle Hengst-Bruggeling: Business Unit Work and Employment
Gert-Jan Vreede: University of Nebraska at Omaha

Group Decision and Negotiation, 2007, vol. 16, issue 4, No 6, 347-361

Abstract: Abstract Groups often rely on the expertise of facilitators to support them in their collaboration processes. The design and preparation of a collaboration process is an important facilitation task. Although there is a significant body of knowledge about the effects of facilitation, there is a dearth of knowledge about the ways in which facilitators design collaboration processes. Increased understanding in this area will contribute to the effective design and use of collaboration support and to the development of collaboration process design support. The research reported in this paper explores the strategies and techniques facilitators use to design a collaboration process, and the aspects of this task they perceive as challenging. We present the results of a questionnaire among professional facilitators. We compare facilitators with different expertise levels to identify challenges in the design of collaboration processes. We discovered that although the activities performed and information used by novices is not very different from expert practices, their limited experience makes them less flexible. When the actual session brings surprises such as different outcomes or conflict, novices cannot easily adapt their designs to accommodate these.

Keywords: facilitation; facilitation techniques; collaboration process design; Collaboration Engineering; design and preparation; Group Support Systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2007
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10726-006-9054-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:grdene:v:16:y:2007:i:4:d:10.1007_s10726-006-9054-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/10726/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10726-006-9054-6

Access Statistics for this article

Group Decision and Negotiation is currently edited by Gregory E. Kersten

More articles in Group Decision and Negotiation from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().