The performance of a team depends not only on the abilities of its individual
members, but also on how these members interact with each other. Inspired by
this premise and motivated by a large number of applications in educational,
industrial and management settings, this thesis studies a family of problems,
known as team-formation problems, that aim to engineer teams that are
effective and successful. The major challenge in this family of problems is
dealing with the complexity of the human team participants. Specifically, each
individual has his own objectives, demands, and constraints that might be in
contrast with the desired team objective. Furthermore, different collaboration
models lead to different instances of team-formation problems. In this thesis,
we introduce several such models and describe techniques and efficient
algorithms for various instantiations of the team-formation problem.
This thesis consists of two main parts. In the first part, we examine three
distinct team-formation problems that are of significant interest in (i)
educational settings, (ii) industrial organizations, and (iii) management
settings respectively. What constitutes an effective team in each of the
aforementioned settings is totally dependent on the objective of the team. For
instance, the performance of a team (or a study group) in an educational
setting can be measured as the amount of learning and collaboration that takes
place inside the team. In industrial organizations, desirable teams are those
that are cost-effective and highly profitable. Finally in management settings,
an interesting body of research uncovers that teams with faultlines are prone
to performance decrements. Thus, the challenge is to form teams that are free
of faultlines, that is, to form teams that are robust and less likely to break
due to disagreements. The first part of the thesis discusses approaches for
formalizing these problems and presents efficient computational methods for
solving them.
In the second part of the thesis, we consider the problem of improving the
functioning of existing teams. More precisely, we show how we can use models
from social theory to capture the dynamics of the interactions between the team
members. We further discuss how teams can be modified so that the interaction
dynamics lead to desirable outcomes such as higher levels of agreement or
lesser tension and conflict among the team members
