We are interdependent beings and we continually have to collaborate to carry out different tasks. Teamwork, helping your child with homework... life itself is a continuous collaboration between people and the friction that occurs during relationships will determine if everything flows correctly.
The psychology of collaboration is a discipline that is responsible for assimilating and understanding the mental, emotional and behavioral processes that influence collaboration between people. The objective of this discipline is to improve the quality and effectiveness of said collaboration through all the psychological components that affect it, both for better and for worse.
How does the psychology of collaboration achieve this? Analyzing the dynamics of interaction, communication between group members, decision-making and how the resolution of the different conflicts that occur throughout the collaboration are carried out. How do people work as a team? How do we communicate and how do we make decisions? Collaboration psychology tries to answer these questions to optimize the result of interactions between people.
This discipline is usually applied to teamwork in companies and organizations, although it can also focus on collaboration between professionals from different disciplines that end up converging, cooperation between countries with different cultures, and interaction between different fields of research such as education. or the scientific area.
The psychology of collaboration is based on the assumption that teamwork will always provide better results than individual effort. This is because teams can take advantage of the skills and experience of each of the members to achieve a certain objective.
In conclusion, we can see that the psychology of collaboration is a very important discipline, since it can allow us to understand how people work as a team, how we can improve interaction to achieve common goals. It is true that not all work groups or teams are the same and each one has its particularities: the study of how psychological factors influence collaboration can be key to the success of teamwork in any situation. Because, after all, we live in a society and we are made to collaborate with each other.
