Fluid role structure in teams: coordination and performance in complex cooperative tasks
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Authors
Banerjee, Sounak
Issue Date
2024-08
Type
Electronic thesis
Thesis
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Cognitive science
Alternative Title
Abstract
Human behavior in a task is largely determined by its context, which include the characteristics of the task and its environment. With human teams, there is an additional level of contextual complexity arising from the properties of the team itself (size, composition, and degree of interdependence to name a few). This creates challenges for the generalizability of team research. Team coordination studies typically focus on teams in which members have highly specialized skills, and roles that complement these skills. Here, I take an exploratory approach to study changes in coordination strategies over time and their effect on performance, for teams with fluid role structures. Additionally, both individual and team level measures of behavior have been considered for the analyses, based on recent recommendations. Team performance data was collected from a cooperative cooking game across 8 one-hour sessions. In addition, 3 cognitive test sessions were also conducted. Results suggest that while planned role coordination strategies were beneficial to team performance towards the beginning of the study, adaptive strategies resulted in better performance after sufficient practice. Further, the average rate of interaction within a team was found to be positively correlated with performance, with significant performance effects associated with a small number of highly interactive or independent players. Finally, examination of cognitive correlates of team skill revealed that participants shifted from relying on visuospatial working memory earlier in the study to attentional control abilities towards the end, for team coordination. These results carry important implications for the design and training of essential service teams such as firefighter, army, paramedic, and search and rescue teams.
Description
August 2024
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Full Citation
Publisher
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY