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Workplace research suggests that roughly equal communication between teammates is positively associated with team effectiveness. A distinction between teams in these studies and distributed action teams is the degree of role specialization and context-driven communication which may entail unequal degrees of communication. Yet, distributed action teams may have more equal footing to provide inputs in contexts such as mission planning or briefings. Twenty-two ad hoc teams participated in a simulated ground combat vehicle task in which teams conducted six-missions and briefed before each mission. We used team performance, team situation awareness, team workload, and team resilience as team effectiveness criteria. Balanced degrees of communication in mission briefs were correlated with performance and resilience measures, and largely uncorrelated with situation-awareness and workload measures. The overall amount of communication was also largely uncorrelated with all effectiveness measures. The results suggest that communication balance in mission briefs may help predict effectiveness in action teams.
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Team Workload in Action Teams: Exploring the Impact of Interdependence
Team workload is a team-level construct considered similar to, but not reducible to, individual workload and mediated by team coordination. Despite this, the conceptualization and measurement of team workload in action teams lags behind that of individual workload. In most empirical studies, team workload is often simply considered as the sum or average of individual team members’ workload. However, unique characteristics of action teams, such as interdependence and heterogeneity, suggest that traditional approaches to conceptualizing and measuring team workload may be inadequate or even misleading. As such, innovative approaches are required to accurately capture this complex construct. This paper presents the development of a simulation designed to investigate the influence of interdependence and demand levels on team workload measures within a 3-person action-team command and control scenario. Preliminary results, which suggest that our manipulations are effective, are provided and discussed.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1828010
- PAR ID:
- 10514501
- Publisher / Repository:
- SAGE Publications
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
- Volume:
- 67
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 1071-1813
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1127 to 1133
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/21695067231192281
