What is the difference between Cooperation and Collaboration in KPTs? Collaboration is a hallmark of KPTs as they work together to achieve a shared goal. The same could be said about cooperation between team members. The difference is in the perception of the behavioral and attitudes that individuals employ through their own motivations about teaming. Cooperation is a standard expectation especially in teams where individuals contribute independently to a shared goal that serves as the sum of parts of a task (Thompson, 1967). In this arrangement, personal needs and interests can outweigh or at very least be in tension with team and group goals (Wagner & Moch, 1986). In KPTs, requirements for teamwork to solve more complex problems or to generate new knowledge will typically overshadow the needs of any individual involved in the team. Therefore, it is important that collaboration be the elevated goal of any team involved in such work. Collaboration differs not only in degree to cooperative efforts due to key principles of engagement. Its necessity is an imperative for solving complex problems, it is a constantly emerging venture as teams grow and mature over time, individual aspects of engagement are as important as the process of knowledge production itself, and collaboration develops in stages (Gajda, 2004). With these principles in mind, exploring the role of the individual in a team and the motivations that are at play on the individual level are important aspects of a team’s function. Many authors have mapped this progression from lower level cooperation to higher levels of collaboration using different hierarchical typologies (Bailey & Koney, 2000; Hogue, Perkins, Clark, Bergstrum, & Slinkski, 1995; Peterson, 1991) but the rationale remains constant that to work in a knowledge-producing environment, a collaborative teaming framework is the hallmark for success over a cooperative one (Gajda, 2004).