Capturing team performance differences through communication based analyses of team cognition

Abstract

Team cognition is shaped by team processes (such as interaction, communication) among the various multidisciplinary team members. Previous studies emphasize the importance of studying team cognition at a holistic level for tasks that require specialization of team members. In our view team cognition includes the team members´ knowledge representations (individual mental and situational model) as well as those indispensable team processes that help to create and share the individual knowledge. Our aim was to explore team performance differences by applying the holistic view of team cognition, studying team communication. After some content based static and sequential communicational analyses, we studied some specific task related communicational utterances in the case of 16 NPP operator teams in simulation environment. The results have revealed the importance of well established task relevant information collection utterances, furthermore the crucial role of coherent information flow. Results are discussed in terms of the usefulness of communication utterances in establishing, modifying accurate team knowledge, in order to describe the underlying process of team performance differences.