Situational Understanding, Workload, and Congruence with the Commander's Mental Model

摘要

For the U.S. Army future force, it will be particularly important to see first, understand first, and act first. to do this, collaborative planning and execution are necessary. These are enabled, in part, by a shared mental model of the situation. Using a technique established by Entin and Entin (2001), the authors examined the relationship between subjects' discrepancies with the commander's mental model and their ratings of their own frustration, workload, effectiveness, and situational understanding (SU). They found that the greater the subject's discrepancy with the commander's mental model, the higher the participants rated their own frustration, and the lower they rated their own workload, effectiveness, and SU. The findings suggest that those who did not have a mental model similar to the commander's were consequently more frustrated at their jobs, less effective, and had lower SU of the situation. The finding of greater discrepancy being associated with lower workloads was explained to be a result of one not having one's head in the game (high discrepancy with the commander's mental model), or being unable to provide products, information, or actions to the commander (low workload). Correlations between discrepancies in mental model and frustration, workload, SU, and effectiveness were higher during low workload and low SU. Overall, the results suggest a link between shared mental models with the commander and team performance, since performance has been consistently linked to constructs such as workload, self-efficacy, and affect. Results further emphasize the need for validated measures of mental model congruence to assess the effectiveness of changes in doctrine, organization, and materiel anticipated in the future force. Research is needed to delineate critical components of shared understanding and their impact on decision making, and to assist in the development of methods to improve shared mental models.