Minimizing Tension in Teams.

In large organizations (e.g., companies, universities, etc.) individual experts with different work habits are asked to work together in order to complete projects or tasks. Oftentimes, the differences in the inherent work habits of these experts causes tension among them, which can prove detrimental for the organization's performance and functioning. The question we consider in this paper is the following: "can this tension be reduced by providing incentives to individuals to change their work habits?" We formalize this question in the definition of the k- AlterHabit problem. To the best of our knowledge we are the first to define this problem and analyze its properties. Although we show that k- AlterHabit is NP-hard, we devise polynomial-time algorithms for solving it in practice. Our algorithms are based on interesting connections that we draw between our problem and other combinatorial problems. Our experimental results demonstrate both the efficiency and the efficacy of our algorithmic techniques on a collection of real data.