Current Search: shared mental models (x)
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- Title
- Facilitating Adaptive Team Performance: The Influence of Membership Fluidity on Learning.
- Creator
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Bedwell, Wendy, Salas, Eduardo, Jentsch, Kimberly, Jentsch, Florian, Rico Munoz, Ramon, Fiore, Stephen, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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Organizations across work domains that utilize teams to achieve organizational outcomes experience change. Resources change. Project deadlines change. Personnel change. Within the scientific community, research has recently surged on the topic of team adaptation to address the issue of change specifically within teams. There have generally been two lines of research regarding team adaptation (task and membership). This effort is focused on membership. Teams are not static(-)members come and...
Show moreOrganizations across work domains that utilize teams to achieve organizational outcomes experience change. Resources change. Project deadlines change. Personnel change. Within the scientific community, research has recently surged on the topic of team adaptation to address the issue of change specifically within teams. There have generally been two lines of research regarding team adaptation (task and membership). This effort is focused on membership. Teams are not static(-)members come and go. The membership adaptation literature has traditionally focused on the performance effects of newcomers to teams. Yet in practice, more and more teams today experience membership loss without replacement. Military units are stretched to capacity. Economic conditions have forced organizations to do more with less. When members leave, they are rarely, if ever, replaced. The very nature of some organizations lends itself to fluid team memberships. Consider an emergency room where a team of nurses and doctors work on Patient A. When a more critical Patient B arrives that requires the expertise of one of those team members, that doctor will leave the Patient A to tend to the Patient B. This practice is common in such work environments. Yet despite the prevalence of this practice, the scientific community knows very little about the impact of losing members on team performance. The current study examines the impact of membership fluidity on team performance. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, there was the need to address an empirical gap in the adaptation literature by focusing on membership changes (loss and loss with replacement) in non-creative tasks. Second was the consideration of the processes underlying adaptation(-)namely learning, operationalized as the development of effective shared mental models (SMMs). Thus, a primary goal was to determine the magnitude of team performance decrements associated with such changes within a decision-making task as well as the associated changes in team process. Results suggest that three-person intact teams demonstrated greater adaptive performance than membership loss with replacement teams. Furthermore, two-person intact teams developed more similar task and team interaction SMMs than membership loss teams when SMMs were indexed as a Euclidean distance score. There were no differences in the level of sharedness regarding task, team interaction or teammate SMMs for three-person intact teams as compared to membership loss with replacement teams. However, when teammate SMMs were operationalized as the personality facets (i.e., the Big 5) in exploratory analyses, three-person intact teams did develop more similar SMMs regarding the agreeableness facet than membership loss with replacement teams. Additionally, when operationalized as Euclidean distance, the agreeableness facet significantly predicted adaptive team performance(-)specifically, the smaller the distance (i.e., more similar the MMs), the greater the adaptive performance in teams. When operationalized as the similarity index, the neuroticism facet significantly predicted adaptive team performance such that the more similar the SMMs, the greater the adaptive performance in teams. Results suggest that membership fluidity does negatively influence the development of shared mental models among teammates. Furthermore, this study provides additional evidence that teammate and team interaction mental models, which are typically not examined together in team studies, are differentially influenced by membership fluidity and differentially predict outcomes like adaptive team performance. This suggests researchers should include both of these cognitive components of team performance to fully understand the nature of these constructs.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2012
- Identifier
- CFE0004356, ucf:49448
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0004356
- Title
- COMMUNICATION MODALITY AND AFTER ACTION REVIEW PERFORMANCE IN A DISTRIBUTED IMMERSIVE VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENT.
- Creator
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Kring, Jason P., Salas, Eduardo, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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Virtual teams, in which geographically separate individuals interact via a technology bridge to perform collective activities, are becoming commonplace in the military, business, and education. Despite numerous benefits, virtual teams often lack face-to-face (FTF) interaction which may alter communication processes and subsequently affect team factors necessary for successful performance. Previous research indicated local teams, with members at the same physical location, outperformed...
Show moreVirtual teams, in which geographically separate individuals interact via a technology bridge to perform collective activities, are becoming commonplace in the military, business, and education. Despite numerous benefits, virtual teams often lack face-to-face (FTF) interaction which may alter communication processes and subsequently affect team factors necessary for successful performance. Previous research indicated local teams, with members at the same physical location, outperformed distributed teams, with members at different locations, in a series of military-style missions in an immersive virtual environment (VE). The present study replicated and extended this effort by measuring how communication modality affects three team factors often cited as facilitating performance: shared mental models (SMMs), cohesion (task and interpersonal), and trust (cognitive and emotional). Local teams were expected to again perform better than distributed teams and exhibit greater SMM similarity, cohesion, and trust. Furthermore, a brief team communication training (TCT) program was administered to half of the teams on the premise training would improve distributed team performance. Thirty two, 2-person teams were distributed into four experimental conditions (n = 8) based on location (local vs. distributed) and training (TCT vs. no-TCT) and then conducted five VE missions. Each mission required the team to search a 10-room building for hazardous materials and opposing forces while protecting neutral bystanders. Results showed local teams again performed better than distributed teams on overall mission performance, however the difference was less robust than anticipated. Analyses of the three team factors revealed a main effect of location as local teams reported higher levels of cognitive trust and more agreement on one of 10 SMM measures than distributed teams. A similar difference was found for the main effect of TCT with trained teams exhibiting higher cognitive trust than no-TCT teams. Results support that distributed teams operating in a common virtual setting experience performance deficits when compared to their physically co-located counterparts. Future research is needed to address the role of cognitive trust for virtual teams, the time required to develop detectable levels of emotional trust and cohesion, and how social presence between team members influences performance.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2004
- Identifier
- CFE0000054, ucf:46074
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0000054
- Title
- INVESTIGATING THE MECHANISMS THAT DRIVE IMPLICIT COORDINATION IN TEAMS.
- Creator
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Hoeft, Raegan, Jentsch, Florian, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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The purpose of this study was to empirically test the oft-noted hypothesis that shared mental models lead to implicit coordination. Specifically, this dissertation investigated the underlying mechanisms of implicit coordination and how different aspects of shared mental models affect the process. The research questions tested in this study were (a)how perceptions of sharedness affect the initiation of implicit coordination, (b) how actual levels of sharedness affect the process of implicit...
Show moreThe purpose of this study was to empirically test the oft-noted hypothesis that shared mental models lead to implicit coordination. Specifically, this dissertation investigated the underlying mechanisms of implicit coordination and how different aspects of shared mental models affect the process. The research questions tested in this study were (a)how perceptions of sharedness affect the initiation of implicit coordination, (b) how actual levels of sharedness affect the process of implicit coordination, and (c) how quality of task mental models affects successful implicit coordination. Sixty same-gender, two-person teams engaged in a complex military reconnaissance planning task in which the team members were required to work together by exchanging information to plan routes for one unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and one unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The results provided partial support for the influence of different facets of shared mental models on the process of implicit coordination. Specifically, individual mental model quality, not perceptions of sharedness or actual mental model sharedness, was the biggest predictor of the initiation of implicit coordination. Additionally, perceptions of sharedness and actual mental model sharedness interacted with one another, such that teams in mismatched conditions (high perceptions of sharedness but low actual sharedness [false consensus], or low perceptions of sharedness and high actual sharedness, [pluralistic ignorance]) tended to increase their communications. The implications and recommendations for future research on implicit coordination and shared mental models are discussed. Additionally, the implications for operators of unmanned vehicles are also discussed.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2006
- Identifier
- CFE0001181, ucf:46857
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0001181
- Title
- TOWARD A THEORY OF PRACTICAL DRIFT IN TEAMS.
- Creator
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Bisbey, Tiffany, Salas, Eduardo, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
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Practical drift is defined as the unintentional adaptation of routine behaviors from written procedure. The occurrence of practical drift can result in catastrophic disaster in high-reliability organizations (e.g. the military, emergency medicine, space exploration). Given the lack of empirical research on practical drift, this research sought to develop a better understanding by investigating ways to assess and stop the process in high-reliability organizations. An introductory literature...
Show morePractical drift is defined as the unintentional adaptation of routine behaviors from written procedure. The occurrence of practical drift can result in catastrophic disaster in high-reliability organizations (e.g. the military, emergency medicine, space exploration). Given the lack of empirical research on practical drift, this research sought to develop a better understanding by investigating ways to assess and stop the process in high-reliability organizations. An introductory literature review was conducted to investigate the variables that play a role in the occurrence of practical drift in teams. Research was guided by the input-throughput-output model of team adaptation posed by Burke, Stagl, Salas, Pierce, and Kendall (2006). It demonstrates relationships supported by the results of the literature review and the Burke and colleagues (2006) model denoting potential indicators of practical drift in teams. Research centralized on the core processes and emergent states of the adaptive cycle; namely, shared mental models, team situation awareness, and coordination. The resulting model shows the relationship of procedure—practice coupling demands misfit and maladaptive violations of procedure being mediated by shared mental models, team situation awareness, and coordination. Shared mental models also lead to team situation awareness, and both depict a mutual, positive relationship with coordination. The cycle restarts when an error caused by maladaptive violations of procedure creates a greater misfit between procedural demands and practical demands. This movement toward a theory of practical drift in teams provides a conceptual framework and testable propositions for future research to build from, giving practical avenues to predict and prevent accidents resulting from drift in high-reliability organizations. Suggestions for future research are also discussed, including possible directions to explore. By examining the relationships reflected in the new model, steps can be taken to counteract organizational failures in the process of practical drift in teams.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2014
- Identifier
- CFH0004636, ucf:45300
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFH0004636