Situational Awareness in Teams With Distributed Expertise: A Multilevel Approach

摘要

Three or four person decision making teams with leaders and expertise distributed among staff members were studied as they performed on a command and control decision making simulation. Multiple experiments were conducted looking at team composition, means of communicating among team members, and other conditions in team settings, such as the form of feedback provided to the teams. Research on gender composition found all male teams, when compared to mixed gender teams and all female ones, spent more time discussing and developing the process by they would conduct the exercise than did teams with the other two compositions, and, given the nature of the task and its time constraints, they performed less well. Research varying the mode of communication among team members found that teams, with a mix of multiple means of communication fit to the cognitive demands of the tasks, made more accurate decisions. Finally, decomposition of measures of decision making accuracy were able to pinpoint forms of accuracy predicted well and not well by the core components of the multilevel theory of team decision making.