Workload, Team Structure, and Communication in Team Performance

Urban, Julie M.; Bowers, Clint A.; Monday, Susan D.; Morgan, Ben B.

doi:10.1207/s15327876mp0702_6

Cited by 71 publications

(45 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…The number and magnitude of these constraints can conspire to undermine interpersonal communication and co-ordination and they underscore the importance of eVective teamwork. The issues associated with teamwork are re¯ected in a growing body of empirical work on team communication (Lassiter et al 1990, Urban et al 1995, team training , shared mental models (Cannon-Bowers et al 1993), methods for measuring teamwork (Fowlkes et al 1994, Brannick et al 1995, Baker and Salas 1997 and models of team development (Morgan et al 1994). Many of these same concerns motivate the research on crew resource management and overall aircrew pro® ciency (Foushee et al 1986, Kanki et al 1989, Kanki and Palmer 1993, Orasanu 1993.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the utility of experiential cross-training for team decision making under time stress

McCann¹,

Baranski²,

Thompson³

et al. 2000

Ergonomics

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This study investigated the effectiveness of experiential cross-training in a team context for team decision-making under time stress in a simulated naval surveillance task. It was hypothesized that teams whose members explicitly experience all team positions will perform better under time pressure due to a better shared Team Interaction Model (Cannon-Bowers et al. 1993). In addition, it was posited that experiential cross-training would reduce the negative effect of member reconfiguration that can occur in certain military situations. Three groups of teams participated in this study (cross-trained, reconfigured and control). The experiment involved three team training sessions, followed by three time-stressed exercise sessions. During training, one group of teams was cross-trained (CT) by asking each member to perform an entire session at each of the three team positions. Member reconfiguration (where each member was shifted to another's position) was unexpectedly introduced at the first of the exercise sessions for the CT group and for another group (reconfigured) that had not been cross-trained. A third (control) group was neither cross-trained nor reconfigured. During training, the performance of non-CT teams improved more quickly than that of CT teams. During the exercise, the CT group did not achieve the level of performance of the control teams. The immediate effect of team member reconfiguration was to degrade performance significantly for the non-CT teams, but not for CT teams. The findings are discussed in terms of the multiple mental models' view of team performance (Cannon-Bowers et al. 1993) and the authors discuss the relative utility of cross-training when overall training time is fixed.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the utility of experiential cross-training for team decision making under time stress

McCann¹,

Baranski²,

Thompson³

et al. 2000

Ergonomics

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“…Since these measures have been associated with increased workload in previous studies (Berthold and Jameson, 1999;Khawaja et al, 2012), we cannot conclude that ineffective teams experienced greater workload. However, it has been shown that different operationalizations of workload (time pressure vs. task/resource demands) can lead to different effects on team performance (Urban et al, 1995). Our study did not disambiguate these factors since the workload condition involved both time pressure and increased task demands.…”

Section: Team Performancementioning

confidence: 78%

“…In terms of speech, Lively et al (1993) found that utterance length decreases with workload, but more recent work by Khawaja et al (2012) found increases in sentence length as well as in speech rate, words indicating disagreement, and the usage of plural personal pronouns (e.g., "we" and "us"). Finally, Urban et al (1995) found that under high workload, effective teams asked fewer questions, made fewer requests, and made fewer responses to requests.These findings should be interpreted with caution because the corresponding studies varied widely in task domain, team size, and team structure. Due to these conflating factors, the effects of workload on dialog and coordination in remotely communicating teams remains unclear.…”

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confidence: 97%

Team Communication as a Collaborative Process

2016

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Communication channels can reveal a great deal of information about the effectiveness of a team. This is particularly relevant for teams operating in performance settings, such as medical groups, military squads, and mixed human-robot teams. Currently, it is not known how various factors, including coordination strategy, speaker role, and time pressure, affect communication in collaborative tasks. The purpose of this paper is to systematically explore how these factors interact with team discourse in order to better understand effective communication patterns. In our analysis of a corpus of remote task-oriented dialog (cooperative remote search task corpus), we found that a variety of linguistic-and dialog-level features were influenced by time pressure, speaker role, and team effectiveness. We also found that effective teams had a higher speech rate and used specific grounding strategies to improve efficiency and coordination under time pressure. These results inform our understanding of the various factors that influence team communication and highlight ways in which effective teams overcome constraints on their communication channels. The success of a team largely depends on how well teammates can coordinate their actions in an efficient manner. However, coordination can be difficult when teammates must dynamically adapt their decision-making, communication, and planning strategies (Serfaty et al., 1993). Sycara and Sukthankar (2006) have identified several capabilities that a team needs to plan and coordinate its actions effectively. These include an overall intention to execute a plan (joint intention), sharing of goals, plans and knowledge of the environment (common ground), and awareness of the roles and responsibilities, as well as the capabilities and limitations of one's teammates (team awareness). Of these elements, perhaps the most important for team success is establishing and maintaining common ground. Common ground facilitates efficient communication, particularly for teams working under stress, by serving as a mutual knowledgebase from which information about goals, plans, and perspectives may be shared (Clark, 1996).In teams with open communication channels, common ground is often established through dialog interaction. The process by which this occurs is known as grounding and consists of two phases -the Presentation Phase and the Acceptance Phase (Clark and Schaefer, 1989). In the Presentation Phase, a speaker makes an utterance and seeks confirmation from the listener that the utterance was understood. This confirmation of understanding comprises the Acceptance Phase, wherein the listener provides evidence that they understood the message. Such evidence can take the form of an overt acknowledgment (e.g., "Okay, " "Got it, " "Mhm, " etc. Due to the highly disfluent Presentation Phase, the searcher is not able to understand what was said, and so must initiate a clarification request through the use of a side sequence. The Acceptance Phase thus consists of this side sequence, followed by the sea...

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“…As an example of an answer to this call, Liu et al (2008) and Urban (1995) Together, these studies focused on trust or structure type, as each relates to measures of effectiveness, and they help identify organizational performance as an outcome variable dependent upon trust level and structure type as organizational input variables. Certainly, outcomes then in turn positively or negatively reinforce truststructure type inputs, but the practical aspect of this research is to understand how managers can better achieve their organizational objectives when considering trust and organizational design.…”

Section: A Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Analysis of the Relationships among Trust Antecedents, Organizational Structures, and Performance Outcomes

Seykora¹

2009

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Public reporting burden for this collection of information is estimated to average 1 hour per response, including the time for reviewing instruction, searching existing data sources, gathering and maintaining the data needed, and completing and reviewing the collection of information. Send comments regarding this burden estimate or any other aspect of this collection of information, including suggestions for reducing this burden, to Washington headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports, 1215 Jefferson Davis Highway, Suite 1204, Arlington, VA 22202-4302, and to the Office of Management and Budget, Paperwork Reduction Project (0704-0188) Washington DC 20503. AGENCY USE ONLY (Leave blank)2. REPORT DATE December 2009 REPORT TYPE AND DATES COVEREDMBA Professional Report 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE Analysis of the Relationships among Trust Antecedents, Organizational Structures, and Performance Outcomes 6. AUTHOR(S) Seykora, Joseph T. FUNDING NUMBERS PERFORMING ORGANIZATION NAME(S) AND ADDRESS(ES)Naval ABSTRACT (maximum 200 words)The project explores and seeks to identify relationships among four trust antecedents, two organizational structures, and two performance outcomes. The results will help to further explain associations between trust level (high or low) and organizational structure. Past research found that the edge organization operating in a high trust environment produces the most accurate results in the least amount of time. Additionally, the research found that accuracy performance in the rigid hierarchy was more resilient than the flexible edge structure to changes in trust level.What has yet to be determined is the extent to which factors leading to perceived trust, also known as "trust antecedents," are responsible for performance in a given structure. To empirically study these relationships, the present research analyzes data collected during an ELICIT simulation experiment involving 135 subject responses. The objective of this project is to identify relationships among the trust antecedents (competence, openness, concern, and reliability), organizational structure (edge and hierarchy), and performance (speed and accuracy). Benefits of this research include recommendations for program/project managers of Integrated Product Teams in Defense Acquisition Programs who desire to optimize team performance by addressing trust antecedents and/or organizational structure. In doing so, managers can make more informed decisions regarding team member organization and trust in order to more accurately and rapidly achieve organizational objectives. NUMBER OF PAGES 101 SUBJECT TERMS TRUST, TRUST ANTECEDENT(S), STRUCTURE, HIERARCHY, EDGE, PERFORMANCE OUTCOMES, SPEED, ACCURACY, ORGANIZATIONAL THEORY, CONTINGENCY THEORY, INTEGRATED PRODUCT TEAM(S), DEFENSE ACQUISITION PROGRAM PRICE CODE SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF REPORT Unclassified SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF THIS PAGE Unclassified SECURITY CLASSIFICATION OF ABSTRACT Unclassified LIMITATION OF ABSTRACT ANALYSIS OF THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG TRU...

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Workload, Team Structure, and Communication in Team Performance

Cited by 71 publications

References 9 publications

On the utility of experiential cross-training for team decision making under time stress

On the utility of experiential cross-training for team decision making under time stress

Team Communication as a Collaborative Process

Analysis of the Relationships among Trust Antecedents, Organizational Structures, and Performance Outcomes

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