Facilitating Knowledge Building in Teams: Can a New Team Training Strategy Help?

Abstract

Problem-solving teams composed of members possessing unique knowledge tend to be ineffective because of impediments that limit information sharing, including the sampling advantage of common information and differential schema structures among team members. Teams using a team training strategy aimed at ameliorating these impediments were expected to experience knowledge building and high performance. Data were collected from 40 teams of three co-located members, which were randomly assigned to a training or control condition. All teams completed a realistic military-based hidden profile problem-solving task. Teams in the training condition were trained to build knowledge using an information board (which served as a knowledge object) accompanied with schema-enriched communication. Teams in the control condition operated as typical co-located problem-solving teams and did not use an information board or receive the training. All hypotheses were supported. Teams experiencing the training strategy had higher knowledge transfer, interoperable knowledge, cognitive congruence, and performance than control teams. The training strategy appears to be effective in aiding teams to ameliorate communication impediments. Apparently, teams externalized their knowledge by communicating aspects of their schemas for task knowledge and visually representing and collaboratively structuring that knowledge.

Technology as Teammate: Examining the Role of External Cognition in Support of Team Cognitive Processes

“…Our main argument is that understanding team cognition as it occurs in real-world work settings requires an expanded view where cognition is seen as distributed and context dependent in a social environment in which artifacts often support cognitive functions ( Suchman, 1987 , 2007 ; Hutchins, 1995a ; Clancey, 1997 ; Hollnagel, 2002 ). Specifically, we advance the notion that artifacts support cognition by enabling the transition and development of internalized knowledge held by team members to externalized knowledge held at the team-level ( Fiore et al, 2010b ; Rentsch et al, 2010 , 2014 ). We draw from a diverse body of research and theory to emphasize that the functions of cognition can, and must be, viewed as sometimes occurring, not just “in” the head, but also “outside the head”; that is, viewing cognition in a broader context as distributed across the boundaries of brains, bodies, and environment ( Fiore, 2012 ; Cooke et al, 2013 ; Gorman, 2014 ).…”

“…While the aforementioned research looked at externalized cognition in support of teamwork in various complex work contexts, evidence for it also comes from research on training and learning. External representations in the form of “information boards” were used in a training study of knowledge building for a collaborative planning task ( Rentsch et al, 2010 ). Information boards supported the creation of artifacts in the form of posts and allowed team members to organize and visually manipulate these posts.…”

Information sharing and decision‐making in multidisciplinary crisis management teams

“…Use of knowledge tools seems to be beneficial not only because they structure the communication behaviors-such as speaking turns and sequence of topics that are discussed-but more particularly because they can provide team members with a cognitive structure that may help them to keep an overview of and efficiently remember the information that is presented in the team (Fiore, Cuevas, & Oser, 2003;Suthers & Hundhausen, 2003). This role of a shared graphical device as a cognitive structuring device gains support from an experimental study of Rentsch, Delise, Salas, and Letsky (2010), in which they trained half of their teams to exchange information on an information board using schema-enriched communication. They found that teams in the training condition made significantly more use of the information board and consequently had higher quality knowledge and more cognitive congruence than teams in a control condition.…”

Establishing team knowledge coordination from a learning perspective

“…Notwithstanding the evidence that poor coordination leads to poor performance and that coordinated teams achieve success, it is not entirely clear which sociocognitive mechanisms may help teams establish this knowledge coordination and likewise prevent poor coordination (Rentsch, Delise, Salas, & Letsky, 2010;Stasser & Titus, 1985). These research strands on team coordination insufficiently address the question of the underlying emergent states, processes, and activities contributing to coordination success (Ren & Argote, 2011).…”