PLATT: A flexible platform for experimental research on team performance in complex environments

Abstract

Teams are everywhere. They can accomplish tasks that exceed the capabilities of single individuals. In our age of information, teams have to be able to cope with an increasingly complex world. Large amounts of information, with an often ambiguous and contradictory nature, tax the abilities of teams. They have to be effective in dynamic and unpredictable environments. To complicate matters even more, team members may be geographically dispersed, necessitating the use of technology to communicate with each other.The complexity that present-day teams have to meet requires scientific understanding (see Salas, Cooke, & Rosen, 2008). Research is needed that aims to gain more insight into the present-day factors affecting team effectiveness, in order to contribute to the development of training methods, interventions, and technology to improve their effectiveness. Studies with existing teams in field settings can provide initial insights in the conditional factors of teamwork. In order to test predictions derived from these field studies systematically and to establish causal relationships, more controlled experimentation is necessary. For these studies, experimental team tasks are necessary. On the one hand, these tasks have to embody the complexity that present-day teams face. Only then can relevant processes emerge and be measured. On the other hand, these tasks have to allow a good degree of control. Only then can processes of interest be measured in a systematic way. Hence, there is a complexity-control tradeoff. The present article describes a recently developed task environment that facilitates controlled experimental research on team performance in complex environments: PLATT (the "planning task for teams" 1 ). PREVIOUS RESEARCHTeam researchers have conducted research on both ends of the simplicity-complexity continuum. They have used either simple tasks in highly controllable laboratory experiments or complex tasks in realistic, high-fidelity simulations. As an example of a simple task that has been used for the study of team performance, consider the "winter survival exercise" (Johnson & Johnson, 1987) The present article introduces PLATT, a recently developed task environment for controlled experimental research on team performance in complex environments. PLATT was developed to meet the research demands posed by the complexity that present-day teams face. It consists of a flexible, modular software architecture and research-specific scenarios. The scenarios can target various types of tasks (e.g., planning, problem solving, and decision making) in different operational contexts. Different software configurations can be used to investigate questions pertaining to team structure, team virtuality, and multiteam systems. We describe the software architecture, one of the scenarios, and the broad range of automated and embedded measurement possibilities that PLATT offers. To illustrate PLATT's possibilities, in the present article, we describe a number of experiments that have used PLATT for a variety of research...

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