Building collaborative research teams

In the last few years I’ve been struck by how individualistic much of academic research culture is (at least in fields I’m more familiar with, mostly social sciences.) As a researcher, your success and reputation is very much determined by your personal ideas and outputs - much more so than contributions to important team efforts. The fact jobs are so competitive means people can end up very protective of ‘their’ research ideas, making collaboration difficult. In my experience, it is pretty rare to find groups working together towards clearly articulated long-term research goals, even in parts of academia that are much more interdisciplinary and collaborative than most. 

While great insights do sometimes come from lone researchers, I suspect much more valuable research comes from groups of people with complementary strengths working together in a fairly directed way towards shared goals. This points to something else that I see lacking in most academic communities: a sense of strategy. While many research groups have loosely shared aims, what individual researchers choose to work on often seems pretty ad-hoc, often involving jumping from one small paper/project to another, without any larger sense of how these build on each other and add to the work of others to create something of value. I think this is partly a consequence of publication pressures being stronger than any other incentives in academia, and the fact that journals often reward incremental contributions to well-established areas over building up and synthesising work to produce actionable conclusions. I’ve certainly seen myself bow to these pressures at times in the last few years: it’s much easier to just work on the next vaguely interesting and exciting-sounding paper than to step back and think about what I’m trying to achieve more broadly.

Beyond publication pressures, taking a more collaborative and strategic approach to research is difficult because many parts of academia have extremely strong norms around autonomy: respecting individuals’ freedom to research what they choose within certain constraints. Working together towards shared goals inevitably requires some sacrifice of individual interests for the sake of the group. And part of the reason many people are attracted to academia is that they value research autonomy very highly. If those same people are then asked to work towards a more externally-determined group strategy they might end up unmotivated and unsatisfied.

That said, I think it’s also true that many people end up unmotivated and unsatisfied in academia because they have too much autonomy. The freedom to choose what you work on sounds great but in practice can also feel like enormous pressure and leave many feeling lost (making it much easier, therefore, to just write the papers someone else wants you to.) Other people who could be really great at research in a slightly more structured environment don’t go into academia because they know they wouldn’t be suited to it when it requires so much self-directedness. While there’s still a balance to be struck between autonomy and structure, I do think there is space for more collaborative and strategic research teams in academia, which might actually suit many people better and improve motivation and productivity over the status quo.

Because there’s a strong focus on autonomy and an individualistic culture in academia, good research management isn’t prioritised that highly. I used to think of good research management mostly in terms of helping individual researchers to be more effective. But there’s also a different kind of management: the kind that provides high-level strategy for a group and a structure within which people can collaborate towards shared goals - which seems even more neglected. If you want to build collaborative research teams, good management is essential.

I don’t know yet what it takes to do this kind of research management well, or especially how to do it in academia without compromising the important aspects of research autonomy. But I want to think a lot more about this. I suspect I might really enjoy and be well-suited to this kind of research management, and that I might be able to do a lot more good by helping build a team who can work effectively together in this way, than I could through my own research. And while there seem to be lots of good books out there on general management or specific areas like engineering management, I’ve struggled to find good advice or discussion on research management that gets at the kind of thing I’m thinking about. I’d love recommendations of things to read, examples of successful collaborative research teams, or people to talk to who are also thinking about or trying to build anything similar.