Effect of Various Methods for Crosstraining on Team Performance (Het effect vandrie verschillende methoden voor crosstraining op het presteren van teams)

摘要

An experiment is described in which the effects of three different methods forcrosstraining on team performance and communication within teams are examined. The methods for crosstraining differ in information contents about the tasks, activities and informational needs of the other team members. They were developed with the aim of answering the following questions: (1) will practice in the tasks of other team members lead to better communication strategies and to an enhanced team performance. (2) Will an explicit training of the shared aspects of the task between different team members result in better performance than crosstraining in which the various team members are trained in each others' total task. Apart from this, the effect of time pressure on the various cross training methods was examined. The results show that the communication between team members is of utmost importance for a good performance of the team. Analysis of the differences between the various methods for crosstraining shows that explicit attention for the shared aspects of the tasks of various team members will lead to better team performance and to the use of more efficient communication strategies. The manipulation of time pressure unfortunately did not result in interpretable results, and has possibly been overshadowed by a general practice effect. The effect of practice in the tasks of other team members is less clear and seems to result in performance improvement only after a short acquaintance period. Suggestions are made for future research.