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1. Team Communication in Pre-Mission Briefs and Effectiveness in Distributed Action Teams

   https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181322661219  

   Lematta, Glenn J.; Bhatti, Shawaiz A.; Graham, Hudson D.; Kim, Joy; Fazio, Walter C.; Holder, Eric; Cooke, Nancy J. (September 2022, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)

   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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2. 'Location, Location, Location': An Exploration of Different Workplace Contexts in Remote Teamwork during the COVID-19 Pandemic

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3579504  

   Breideband, Thomas; Moulder, Robert Glenn; Martinez, Gonzalo J.; Caruso, Megan; Mark, Gloria; Striegel, Aaron D.; D'Mello, Sidney (April 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction: Computer Supported Collaborative Work)

   Much emphasis has been placed on how the affordances and layouts of an office setting can influence co-worker interactions and perceived team outcomes. Little is known, however, whether perceptions of teamwork and team conflict are affected when the location of work changes from the office to the home. To address this gap, we present findings from a ten-week,in situ study of 91 information workers from 27 US-based teams. We compare three distinct work locations---private and shared workspaces at home as well at the office---and explore how each location may impact individual perceptions of teamwork. While there was no significant association with participants' perceptions of teamwork, results revealed associations of work location with team conflict: participants who worked in a private room at home reported significantly lower team conflict compared to those working in the office. No difference was found for the office and the shared workspace. We further found that the influence of work location on team conflict interacted with job decision latitude and the level of task interdependence among co-workers. We discuss practical implications for full-time work from home (WFH) on teams. Our study adds an important environmental dimension to the literature on remote teaming, which in turn may help organizations as they consider, prepare, or implement more permanent WFH and/or hybrid work policies in the future. 

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3. Quantifying Visual Attention of Teams During Workload Transitions Using AOI-Based Cross-Recurrence Metrics

   https://doi.org/10.1177/21695067231193683  

   Atweh, Jad A; Hayek, Jackie Al; Riggs, Sara L (September 2023, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)

   Cross-recurrence quantification analysis (CRQA) metrics may offer a means to provide information about the quality of collaboration in real-time. The goal of the present work is to use Area of Interest (AOI) based CRQA metrics to analyze the eye-tracking data of 10 pairs who participated in a shared unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) command and control task. We are interested in how teams respond to workload transitions and how it affects AOI-based CRQA metrics. The results showed that as workload increased, team members spent a longer time on the same task which may indicate that they are coordinating together on a task, or they are not adapting and getting “trapped” in certain tasks. The findings suggest that CRQA AOI-based metrics are sensitive to workload changes and validate these metrics in unraveling the visual puzzle of how workload impacts scanpath patterns which contribute to quantifying the adaptation process of pairs over time. This also has the potential to inform the design of real-time technology in the future. 

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4. Novelty Seeking Multiagent Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3583131.3590428  

   Aydeniz, A; Loftin, R; Tumer, K. (July 2023, Association for Computing Machinery)

   Silva, S; Paquete, L (Ed.)

   Coevolving teams of agents promises effective solutions for many coordination tasks such as search and rescue missions or deep ocean exploration. Good team performance in such domains generally relies on agents discovering complex joint policies, which is particularly difficult when the fitness functions are sparse (where many joint policies return the same or even zero fitness values). In this paper, we introduce Novelty Seeking Multiagent Evolutionary Reinforcement Learning (NS-MERL), which enables agents to more efficiently explore their joint strategy space. The key insight of NS-MERL is to promote good exploratory behaviors for individual agents using a dense, novelty-based fitness function. Though the overall team-level performance is still evaluated via a sparse fitness function, agents using NS-MERL more efficiently explore their joint action space and more readily discover good joint policies. Our results in complex coordination tasks show that teams of agents trained with NS-MERL perform significantly better than agents trained solely with task-specific fitnesses. 

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5. Operationalizing team commitment in a project-based learning environment

   https://doi.org/10.1109/FIE56618.2022.9962577  

   Jaiswal, Aparajita; Karabiyik, Tugba; Thomas, Paul; Magana, Alejandra J. (October 2022, Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE))

   Commitment is a multi-dimensional construct that has been extensively researched in the context of organizations. Organizational and professional commitment have been positively associated with technical performance, client service, attention to detail, and degree of involvement with one’s job. However, there is a relative dearth of research in terms of team commitment, especially in educational settings. Teamwork is considered a 21stcentury skill and higher education institutions are focusing on helping students to develop teamwork skills by applied projects in the coursework. But studies have demonstrated that creating a team is not enough to help students build teamwork skills. Literature supports the use of team contracts to bolster commitment, among team members. However, the relationship between team contracts and team commitment has not been formally operationalized.This research category study presents a mixed-methods approach towards characterizing and operationalizing team commitment exhibited by students enrolled in a sophomore-level systems analysis and design course by analyzing team contracts and team retrospective reflections. The course covers concepts pertaining to information systems development and includes a semester-long team project where the students work together in four or five member teams to develop the project deliverables. The students have prior software development experiences through an introductory systems development course as well as multiple programming courses. The data for this study was collected through the team contracts signed by students belonging to one of the 23 teams of this course. The study aims to answer the following research question: How can team commitment be characterized in a sophomore-level system analysis and design course among the student teams?A rubric was developed to quantify the team commitment levels of students based on their responses on the team contracts. Students were classified as high or low commitment based on the rubric scores. The emergent themes of high and low commitment teams were also presented. The results indicated that the high commitment teams were focused on setting goals, effective communication, and having mechanisms in place for timely feedback and improvement. On the other hand, low commitment teams did not articulate the goals of the project, they demonstrated a lack of dedication for attending team meetings regularly, working as a team, and had a lack of proper coordination while working together. 

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