Abstract
This chapter analyses how one particular governance mechanism affects the performance of research teams. Specifically, we look at the requirement for interdisciplinarity and internationality of Research Training Groups (RTGs) and study how RTG performance is affected. We expect to observe two countervailing effects of changes in interdisciplinarity and/or internationality: first, an increased performance due to an increase in productive resources and second, a decreased performance due to increased team problems (communication, conflicts etc.). Since both effects are expected to vary between the disciplinary fields of research, we separate our analysis for the humanities and social sciences and the natural and life sciences. Furthermore, we separately analyse the effects of interdisciplinarity on the one hand and internationality on the other hand. We find that the effectiveness of a particular governance mechanism varies substantially between the disciplinary fields and for the type of heterogeneity under consideration (i.e., interdisciplinarity vs. internationality). Therefore governance of research should be either precisely engineered to a particular disciplinary field and a given type of heterogeneity or it should offer a menu of options that allows research teams to choose from, according to their specific needs.
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Notes
- 1.
Whenever the number of co-authors was not specified in the research reports but the expression “et al.” hinted at a joint production of publication outputs, we supplemented our data from the RTG research reports by information gathered from the internet.
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Pferdmenges, B., Pull, K., Backes-Gellner, U. (2015). Composition and Performance of Research Training Groups. In: Jansen, D., Pruisken, I. (eds) The Changing Governance of Higher Education and Research. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 43. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09677-3_2
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