Empirical Assessment of a Model of Team Collaboration

2008

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PsycEXTRA Dataset

Ergonomics, 2015

The structure of command teams is a significant factor on their communications and ability to process, and act upon, information. The NATO Problem Space was used in this study to represent three of the main dimensions in the battle-space environment: Familiarity, Rate of Change, and Strength of Information Position. Results show that the five common team structures (chain, Y, circle, wheel and all-connected) did not generally perform as predicted in team literature. Findings suggest that under dynamic and highly variable conditions, high levels of synchronization and trust should be present. On the other hand, synchronisation and trust are less important in hierarchical, highly centralised structures, because team members are more willing to accept the authority of a single leader and this tight control ensures that these teams can perform well as long as the Problem Space is familiar, information is explicit, and the environment does not change.

Technological advances have yielded significant changes in the way people work. Decision makers dealing with complex, ill-structured problems, dynamic environments with significant time stress, shifting or competing goals, and significant consequences for failure are particular targets for technological support. In fact, these same characteristics are key task indicators in naturalistic decision-making (NDM) contexts . In many environments, the employment of technology has led to teams in which members are more mobile, more versatile, and more distributed in time, space, and purpose. Often these teams are ad hoc-they are brought together for a limited time span to address a specific problem and often have diverse backgrounds and technical expertise that form the basis for their selection onto the team. This expertise provides a second key distinguishing characteristic of NDM research; that is, it does not address naïve participants, but rather experienced decision makers.

Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, 2009

In order to improve our understanding of situation awareness (SA) in teams performing in technologically advanced command, control, and communications (C3) operations, researchers need to develop valid approaches to assess both individual and shared SA. We investigated SA in an interdisciplinary military rescue operation training exercise. For this study, we developed procedures to measure the degree of shared SA between two team members and to improve the accuracy of their shared SA scores. We suggest that SA scores that are calculated using many existing methods may be inflated because they often fail to account for error in terms of both the amount of information that is thought to be relevant and in the accuracy of a person's knowledge of it. We calculated true SA scores that account for both of these types of error. The measures were then used to evaluate five potential predictors of shared SA. Our analysis suggested that failure to compensate for error in SA may lead to overestimation of performance in a situation. The results also revealed a significant relationship between shared SA and participants' distance from a central, joint service team, which acted as the organizational hub within the C3 structure. Shared SA was better the further away from the hub people were, which suggests that a person's role and position within an organization affects the level of shared SA that can be achieved with other individuals.

IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 1998

An experiment investigating the effect of communication training and three group composition variables was performed with Patriot air defense teams for two different types of aircraft identification tasks. It was predicted that communication training would significantly enhance communication quantity and quality and, in turn, team performance for both tasks. Although the training did sometimes improve team communication processes, it did not improve team performance. The variable that had the biggest positive effect on communication quality and team performance was the number of hours a team had worked together. This effect was only found, however, for the type of task for which Patriot teams routinely train. It did not transfer to the less frequent and more cognitively stressing task where there is conflicting information about unknown aircraft, as in the U.S.S. Vincennes tragedy.

2009

Shared understanding is commonly seen as essential to the success of coalition operations. Anecdotal reports suggest that shared understanding enables coalition forces to coordinate their efforts in respect of mission goals, and shortfalls in shared understanding are frequently cited as the reason for poor coalition performance. In spite of this consensus regarding the importance of shared understanding, however, there are very few empirical studies that attempt to explore shared understanding in a military coalition context. This paper attempts to support future research efforts into shared understanding by proposing a specific definition for shared understanding and identifying a number of research challenges. Shared understanding is defined as the ability of multiple agents to exploit common bodies of causal knowledge for the purposes of accomplishing common (or shared) goals. This definition implies that agents possessing shared understanding will be capable of coordinating their respective behaviours in order to ensure the efficient realization of cognitive and behavioural objectives. We also identify a number of areas for future research into shared understanding. These include the factors that affect shared understanding, the effect of shared understanding on coalition performance, and the development of techniques to reliably measure and assess understanding in coalition environments.

Military Psychology, 2011

2006

Collaboration technologies used in current military operations, such as email, instant messaging, and desktop conferencing, assist explicit communications between distributed team members. However, research in corporate environments has shown that explicit communication, while an important aspect of collaboration, is often used together with more subtle interactions to help teams communicate and coordinate their joint work. For example, monitoring other team members' ongoing task activities help teams integrate related task activities, identify appropriate interruption opportunities, and provide assistance when necessary. When physically distributed, as is often the case in command and control environments, it is difficult to engage in such subtle behaviors because team members' activities are not visibly accessible. Instead, people must resort to explicit methods, such as asking for a status update. These explicit methods require effort from both parties and can be disruptive. To address these issues in corporate work settings, collaboration technologies have been developed to help people remain apprised of remote colleagues' activities, while minimizing disruption. This paper examines the suitability of these corporate technologies for supporting military team interactions, with a focus on identifying aspects of military teamwork that are well supported by these approaches and aspects requiring new methods.

Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 2019

How team cognition is conceptualized has evolved rapidly in the last decade with the emerging use of a systems approach, moving the focus from the cognition residing in the heads of individuals, to that distributed across the team. This is referred to as ‘distributed cognition’. Increasingly, network approaches are being explored in attempts to model team distributed cognition. The specific domain of interest in the present study is the sociotechnical system within a maritime control room. This comprises human, machine and software agents interacting to interpret sensor data in order to develop a timely and accurate picture of surrounding contacts at sea. To achieve the goal, information is shared or integrated across the maritime control room consoles. The aim of this study was to develop and apply a suite of workload, situation awareness and team performance measures, including network analysis techniques, to examine how the distributed cognition of a team might change as a functi...