Origins of coordination and team effectiveness: A perspective from game theory and nonlinear dynamics.

Abstract

Coordination occurs when 2 or more people do the same or complementary tasks at the same time; it takes several forms. The form of coordination studied here was similar to behavior at a 4-way stop traffic intersection. The performance task involved 12 4-person groups and a special card game. Split-plot analysis of variance (ANOVA) showed that coordination rules were implicitly learned and then transferred successfully to new rules of similar difficulty and that coordination can occur without verbal mediation or leadership actions. Transfer of coordination was less positive to a task of greater difficulty. Nonlinear regression showed that fixed-point attractors could be extracted from all learning curves. The difficult shift contained a second chaotic process and a critical utility threshold at which the difficult rule could be mastered or not. Work-group effectiveness has been studied from a variety of perspectives; central themes have included cooperation, cohesion, incentives, task structure, size, and leadership attributes. In this project we focused on the dynamics of group coordination and traced its conceptual origins; here we report new theory, an experiment, and analytic techniques that explore the origins of coordination in groups. Coordination occurs when two or more people do the same or complementary tasks at the same time. Coordination is vital to group effectiveness in situations where a successful outcome for the entire group is the end result of numerous contributions or efforts by all group members and where successful contributions by one participant are contingent on a correct and timely contribution by another participant. Coordination among team members has been recognized as an important correlate of team performance

Work Groups and Teams in Organizations

“…Assessments consistent with the conceptualization sketched above have focused on temporal response patterns and sequential analysis (Zalesny et al, 1995), such as using observer ratings of communication patterns (Brannick, Roach, & Salas, 1993), measuring the amount of time one team member waits for another before engaging in a joint effort (Coovert, Campbell, Cannon-Bowers, & Salas, 1995), and using Petri Empirical research has established team coordination as an important correlate of team performance. For example, Guastello and Guastello (1998) reported that coordination rules were implicitly learned and then transferred successfully to new rules of similar difficulty. They also noted that team coordination may occur without verbal mediation or leadership actions and that coordination transfer was less positive to a task of greater difficulty.…”

Nonlinear Dynamical Systems Applications to Psychology and Management

“…The results of Intersection game experiments to date show that if the experimental task is not excessively difficult, the group will display a coordination learning curve (Guastello and Guastello, 1998). The coordination acquired during one task session will transfer to the learning and performance curve of a second task.…”

“…NDS has extended this principle to the explanation of work group coordination, making it a group learning phenomenon (Guastello and Guastello, 1998;Guastello et aI., 2005a). Team members implicitly learn to coordinate with each other and entrain their behaviors to each other while engaging in a more explicit task learning objective.…”

Nonlinear Dynamics in Psychology

“…Where z is behavior and a is the Lyapunov exponent which is constrained to negative values (Guastello, 1995;Guastello and Guastello, 1998 …”

“…If the self-organization process is complete, as in the case of a feasible task, the common learning curve would result, which would in turn be characterized as a fixed point attractor, as in Eq. (4):Where z is behavior and a is the Lyapunov exponent which is constrained to negative values (Guastello, 1995;Guastello and Guastello, 1998 In the in event that learning is incomplete, an asymptote does not form, and the exponent in Eq. (4) or (5) is positive.…”