Cognitive, social, and environmental attributes of distributed engineering collaboration: A review and proposed model of collaboration

The objective of this article is to review the attributes that influence distributed collaboration groups engaged in engineering tasks in order to guide the research into the development of new tools and methods to support engineering groups. Three comprehensive areas of literature that describe the cognitive, social, and environmental factors influencing collaboration are covered including task characteristics, collaborative technology, and group/individual development. A model is proposed that can contribute to the understanding of the engineering collaboration process, distributed group interaction, and the role of the task within this environment. The relationships between the attributes included in the model are hypothesized to affect the distributed collaboration process. This article discusses the attributes and suggests that further research is required to validate the model's relationships.