Macrocognition in Teams Letsky, Michael P.; Warner, Norman W.; Fiore, Stephen M. ...
2008, 2008-09-01
eBook
Macrocognition in Teams provides readers with a greater understanding of the macrocognitive processes which support collaborative team activity, showcasing current research, theories, methodologies ...and tools. It will be of direct relevance to academics, researchers and practitioners interested in group/team interaction, performance, development and training.
Theories of Team Cognition Salas, Eduardo; Fiore, Stephen M; Letsky, Michael P
2012, 20130617, 2011, 2013-06-17, 20120101
eBook
Cognitive processes in teams have been a valuable arena for team researchers to explore. Team cognition research advances and informs a variety of disciplines, including cognitive and social ...sciences, engineering, military science, organizational science, human factors, medicine, and communications. There has been a great deal of progress in the team cognition literature, yet the field is still in its early stages of maturity. There is much more to be gained from the field's insights and there is a need to unite the diverse array of scholarly ideas that permeate the field. This movement will serve to organize the research and ideas that have surfaced in the field, thereby making them more accessible to different disciplines while at the same time, motivating continued progress in the field. This book aims to be a step in this direction and acts as a forum for leading scholars to share their ideas, theories, models, and conceptions about what matters and where more attention is needed in the field of team cognition.
Cognitive processes in teams have been a valuable arena for team researchers to explore. Team cognition research advances and informs a variety of disciplines, including cognitive and social ...sciences, engineering, military science, organizational science, human factors, medicine, and communications. There has been a great deal of progress in the team cognition literature, yet the field is still in its early stages of maturity. There is much more to be gained from the field’s insights and there is a need to unite the diverse array of scholarly ideas that permeate the field. This movement will serve to organize the research and ideas that have surfaced in the field, thereby making them more accessible to different disciplines while at the same time, motivating continued progress in the field. This book aims to be a step in this direction and acts as a forum for leading scholars to share their ideas, theories, models, and conceptions about what matters and where more attention is needed in the field of team cognition.
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book describes multidisciplinary efforts investigating collaboration in dynamic ...environments, all in support of understanding complex collaborative problem-solving. It illustrates multidisciplinary research blending theory and methods from the cognitive, organizational and information sciences have come a long way in helping us understand teams. The book discusses how these contributions can be developed to support this burgeoning field of macrocognition. It also discusses some of the significant challenges facing multidisciplinary research in macrocognition. It reviews the relationship between shared mental models and team performance. The book discusses the study of self-synchronizing behaviors in teams working without verbal or textual communications. It describes a more dynamic conceptualization of macrocognition by attending to the internalization and externalization of cognitive processes. The book also describes investigations of the cognitive efficiency of mediating, coordinating, and attention focusing artifacts from a more traditional cognitive science perspective.
Teamwork, by its very definition, is achieved when members interact interdependently and work together toward shared and valued goals. Further, expert teamwork involves the adaptation of ...collaboration strategies through coordination, cooperation, and communication, as well as a collective understanding of the task so that the team can reach its goals (Salas & Cannon-Bowers, 2000). Cognitive psychology has substantially influenced the study of teams, and it has been over a decade since the original applications of constructs from cognitive psychology were used to foster the development of the team cognition movement (e.g., Cannon-Bowers, Salas, & Converse, 1993; Hutchins, 1991; Orasanu, 1990). Since then, much cross-disciplinary attention has focused on determining how cognitive processes contribute to effective team performance. What is invariant across these disciplines is the notion that shared information processing among group members has both inter- and intraindividual outcomes (e.g., Levine, Resnick, & Higgins, 1993), whereby constructs such as encoding, storage, and retrieval of information are thought to be equally applicable to both individuals and groups (e.g., Hinsz, Tindale, & Vollrath, 1997; Larson & Christensen, 1993; Tindale & Kameda, 2000).
This chapter focuses on team communication processes, the contribution of the between the heads (BTH) approach to measuring and understanding team cognition. An important distinction that can be made ...between in the head (ITH) versus BTH measures is related to classical information processing theory versus ecological psychology. Communication itself can take many forms, including non-verbal communication such as gestures and eye contact and verbal communication that ranges from written or digital text and voice communications. Communication can also occur among individuals who are distributed across time and space and thus can be asynchronous, synchronous, face-to-face, or at a distance. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) measures and keyword indexing measures have been compared on very basic levels. Correlations based on over 20,545 utterances in four unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) experiments between LSA vector length, keyword vector length and word counts across four UAV experiments.
In this chapter, the authors focus on team cognition notion of macrocognition in teams to consider teams in complex problem-solving environments. They follow recent thinking on team problem solving, ...which has differentiated between traditional team cognition approaches to understanding interaction and macrocognition in teams. The authors examine and emphasize the knowledge-building process and its intrinsic importance to how they are conceptualizing macrocognition in teams. Their goal is to explicate this process in order to take the steps necessary to measure what they argue is a foundational process of team macrocognition. The authors provide not operational definitions of foundational process of team macrocognition; rather, they provide conceptual definitions of knowledge building as this is a critical precursor to measurement. The authors conclude with a definition of knowledge building as it occurs in macrocognition in teams, centering on the notion of actionability, and demonstrate how these can be fit together in support of measuring a core part of complex collaborative problem solving.
Macrocognition in Teams Letsky, Michael; Warner, Norman W.
Macrocognition in Teams,
2008
Book Chapter
Macrocognition in team collaboration is a relatively new area of human cognition. A critical component to conducting empirical research in macrocognition is the use of sensitive measures of the ...various macrocognitve processes. The core of the Collaboration and Knowledge Interoperability Program (CKI) is focused on basic research, in the terms of the Office of Naval Research, 'Discovery and Invention'. The objective of the CKI program is to respond to emerging needs in both the military and business environments to better understand and improve the effectiveness of team decision-making in complex, data-rich situations. Individual knowledge development is the process of individual team member conversion of data into knowledge about the situation at hand. The process includes collecting, fusing, filtering, representing and displaying knowledge produced in a format that can be shared. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
In many contexts, teams are capable of solving complex problems that are well beyond the capacity of any one individual team member (Salas, Cannon-Bowers, & Johnston, 1997; Salas, Rosen, Burke, & ...Goodwin, 2009). However, not all teams are successful, and failures often come at high costs. Identifying factors that distinguish successful and unsuccessful team collaboration has thus been a consistent and highly relevant topic of team research.
