Team Cognition

The sports sciences have long been involved in investigations of team process and performance; nonetheless, there is a surprising paucity of cross-disciplinary interaction between researchers in team cognition and sports psychology The overarching purpose of this invited special issue is to redress this problem by providing an outlet for leading researchers in the field of team cognition to discuss their own and related work in the context of sports psychology The cognitive processes arising during the complex and dynamic interaction of teams are the focus of this special issue In order to ground these discussions, in this lead article to our special issue we discuss some of the key concepts emerging from the literature on team cognition First, we briefly describe the study of cognition in teamwork and then we discuss the etymology of a subset of key concepts emerging from this study Our goal is to highlight the utility of such discussions and provide some initial insights for how to strengthen cross-disciplinary research

Abstract: Improving human systems integration through technologically advanced training and performance aids has become increasingly important to military transformation. Measures of improved cognitive and coordination processes arising from the employment of transformational tools are necessary to guide the refinement and future development of such technologies.

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary expertsare well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures. Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively monitoring and...

Collaborating with others takes intriguing and complex forms. We collaborate with others in a wide variety of activities: from team sports to shared labour, from committee work to mass demonstrations, from dancing to reminiscing together about old times. Recently, philosophy of mind and cognitive science has turned to theorizing and studying socio-cognitive interactions of these kinds, asking what kinds of adaptive and shared intelligence are involved in collaborative activities in small groups. Theorists focus on complex and intricate cognitive and affective processes that spread beyond a single individual’s brain – distributed across the body and/or the environment, coopting objects and driving interactions with other individuals. We explore embodied practices of collaboration in sporting and other performance contexts, drawing on rich literatures from cognitive psychology, sports psychology, organisational psychology and social ontology.  Our interest in both sport and embodied minds centres on cases in which people are not working or moving alone, but in which individual participants’ unique skills and capacities are coordinated with those of others in service of shared goals. We identify a range of levels of socio-cognitive processes that interact to drive and sustain embodied collaboration in a variety of contexts. By appreciating how such processes interact, we can begin to understand how human collaboration is achieved and maintained.

When musicians improvise together, they tend to agree beforehand on a common structure (e.g., a jazz standard) which helps them coordinate. However, in the particular case of collective free improvisation (CFI), musicians deliberately avoid having such referent. How, then, can they coordinate? We propose that CFI musicians who have experience playing together come to share higher-level knowledge, which is not piece-specific but rather task-specific, i.e., an implicit mental model of what it is to improvise freely. We tested this hypothesis on a group of 19 expert improvisers from the Parisian CFI community, who had various degrees of experience playing with one another. Drawing from the methodology of team cognition, we used a card-sorting procedure on a set of 25 short improvised sound sequences to elicit and represent each participant’s mental model of the CFI task. We then evaluated the similarity between the participants’ models, and used the measure in a nearest neighbor classification algorithm to retrieve clusters of participants who were known to play together. As hypothesized, we found that the degree of similarity in participants’ mental models predicted their degree of
musical familiarity with better-than-random accuracy: musicians who played together tended to “think” about improvised music in the same way.

Free improvisation is often presented as a form of musical creation where preliminary decisions or preexisting plans are kept to a strict minimum. However, long-standing groups and collaborations that span over many years are not uncommon in the free improvisation scene. One might wonder, then, how do these musicians work together? How do they manage to balance the openness, spontaneity, and unpredictability of free improvisation with the unstoppable normalizing force of familiarity? In order to answer these questions, we need to understand what is at stake during rehearsals of free improvisers. What do these improvisers do when they work and practice together, since they literally have nothing pre-established to rehearse, or at least no pre-composed material, such as standards, arrangements, chord charts, and themes?

This paper presents the results of an ethnographic study conducted with three Paris-based improvisation ensembles: the Orchestre des Nouvelles Créations, Expérimentations et Improvisations (“Orchestra of new creations, experimentations, and improvisations”); a duo comprising pianist Ève Risser and clarinetist Joris Rühl; and a quintet made up of the five founding members of the “Umlaut” collective. This data is used to show the different functions rehearsals have for these improvisers.

In this paper we advance team theory by describing how cognition occurs across the distribution of members and the artifacts and technology that support their efforts. We draw from complementary theorizing coming out of cognitive engineering and cognitive science that views forms of cognition as external and extended and integrate this with theorizing on macrocognition in teams. Two frameworks are described that provide the groundwork for advancing theory and aid in the development of more precise measures for understanding team cognition via focus on artifacts and the technologies supporting their development and use. This includes distinctions between teamwork and taskwork and the notion of general and specific competencies from the organizational sciences along with the concepts of offloading and scaffolding from the cognitive sciences. This paper contributes to the team cognition literature along multiple lines. First, it aids theory development by synthesizing a broad set of perspectives on the varied forms of cognition emerging in complex collaborative contexts. Second, it supports research by providing diagnostic guidelines to study how artifacts are related to team cognition. Finally, it supports information systems designers by more precisely describing how to conceptualize team-supporting technology and artifacts. As such, it provides a means to more richly understand process and performance as it occurs within sociotechnical systems. Our overarching objective is to show how team cognition can both be more clearly conceptualized and more precisely measured by integrating theory from cognitive engineering and the cognitive and organizational sciences.

Interdisciplinary understanding requires integration of insights from
different perspectives, yet it appears questionable whether disciplinary experts
are well prepared for this. Indeed, psychological and cognitive scientific studies
suggest that expertise can be disadvantageous because experts are often more biased
than non-experts, for example, or fixed on certain approaches, and less flexible in
novel situations or situations outside their domain of expertise. An explanation is
that experts’ conscious and unconscious cognition and behavior depend upon their
learning and acquisition of a set of mental representations or knowledge structures.
Compared to beginners in a field, experts have assembled a much larger set of
representations that are also more complex, facilitating fast and adequate perception
in responding to relevant situations. This article argues how metacognition should be
employed in order to mitigate such disadvantages of expertise: By metacognitively
monitoring and regulating their own cognitive processes and representations,
experts can prepare themselves for interdisciplinary understanding. Interdisciplinary
collaboration is further facilitated by team metacognition about the team, tasks,
process, goals, and representations developed in the team. Drawing attention to
the need for metacognition, the article explains how philosophical reflection on the
assumptions involved in different disciplinary perspectives must also be considered
in a process complementary to metacognition and not completely overlapping with
it. (Disciplinary assumptions are here understood as determining and constraining
how the complex mental representations of experts are chunked and structured.) The
article concludes with a brief reflection on how the process of Reflective Equilibrium
should be added to the processes of metacognition and philosophical reflection in
order for experts involved in interdisciplinary collaboration to reach a justifiable
and coherent form of interdisciplinary integration. An Appendix of “Prompts or
Questions for Metacognition” that can elicit metacognitive knowledge, monitoring,
or regulation in individuals or teams is included at the end of the article.

Objective: This article presents a model for predicting complex collaborative processes as they arise in one-of-a-kind problem-solving situations to predict performance outcomes. The goal is to outline a set of key processes and their interrelationship and to describe how these can be used to predict collaboration processes embedded within problem-solving contexts. Background: Teams are increasingly called upon to address complex problem-solving tasks in novel situations.

This paper discusses a theoretical framework designed to elucidate the many issues surrounding distributed team performance, emphasizing how work characteristics associated with such teams may alter both the processes and the products emerging from distributed interaction. It is suggested that distributed team performance can best be understood through conceptualization of a coordination space within which distributed interaction occurs over time and distance. The goal is to take a socio-technical approach to distributed team research so that one can explicate both the cognitive consequences of a lack of co-location as well as the social consequences affecting interaction and team development when work is technology-mediated. The overall objective is to present a framework of 'distributed coordination' such that the principles most appropriate for distributed team performance can be developed.

Multiple theories of problem-solving hypothesize that there are distinct qualitative phases exhibited during effective problem-solving. However, limited research has attempted to identify when transitions between phases occur. We integrate theory on collaborative problem-solving (CPS) with dynamical systems theory suggesting that when a system is undergoing a phase transition it should exhibit a peak in entropy and that entropy levels should also relate to team performance. Communications from 40 teams that collaborated on a complex problem were coded for occurrence of problem-solving processes. We applied a sliding window entropy technique to each team's communications and specified criteria for (a) identifying data points that qualify as peaks and (b) determining which peaks were robust. We used multilevel modeling, and provide a qualitative example, to evaluate whether phases exhibit distinct distributions of communication processes. We also tested whether there was a relationship between entropy values at transition points and CPS performance. We found that a proportion of entropy peaks was robust and that the relative occurrence of communication codes varied significantly across phases. Peaks in entropy thus corresponded to qualitative shifts in teams’ CPS communications, providing empirical evidence that teams exhibit phase transitions during CPS. Also, lower average levels of entropy at the phase transition points predicted better CPS performance. We specify future directions to improve understanding of phase transitions during CPS, and collaborative cognition, more broadly.

This paper addresses the question of how communication structures arise in high and low performing teams. It draws on different social theories to predict typical patterns that correlate with high or low team performance. This theoretical approach is evaluated using data from virtual teams in an experimental design. We show that a high level of reciprocity, a high in-degree for communication recipients and direct communication between the team members (rather than communication via intermediaries) are indicators of high team performance. The dynamic network structures which have been established and developed by the exchange of several hundred e-mails are analyzed using a new dynamic, actor-oriented event model for social networks.

Confidence in distributed or virtual team working is running high. However, some concern is evident that practice is leaping ahead of theories to guide its implementation. There are calls for new and improved theories to specifically embrace distributed team working. This chapter is a response to such calls offering a complex systems based model of organization development originally designed to improve performance of the management of technology and innovation, but which also underpins a methodology of community of practice and team development known as the KALiF System. The theory and model described here is mainly a synthesis of established team and community of practice theory, Dunbar’s Social Brain Hypothesis, and elements of complexity science based on the work of the biologists and systems thinkers Humberto Maturana & Francisco Varela and also Stuart Kaufmann on attenuated supracritical systems.

Perfectionism is a personality characteristic that has been found to predict sports performance in athletes. To date, however, research has exclusively examined this relationship at an individual level (i.e., athletes' perfectionism predicting their personal performance). The current study extends this research to team sports by examining whether, when manifested at the team level, perfectionism predicts team performance. A sample of 231 competitive rowers from 36 boats completed measures of self-oriented, team-oriented, and team-prescribed perfectionism before competing against one another in a 4-day rowing competition. Strong within-boat similarities in the levels of team members' team-oriented perfectionism supported the existence of collective team-oriented perfectionism at the boat level. Two-level latent growth curve modeling of day-by-day boat performance showed that team-oriented perfectionism positively predicted the position of the boat in midcompetition and the li...

Perfectionism is a personality characteristic that has been found to predict sports performance in athletes. To date, however, research has exclusively examined this relationship at an individual level (i.e., athletes’ perfectionism predicting their personal performance). The current study extends this research to team sports by examining whether, when manifested at team level, perfectionism predicts team performance. A sample of 231 competitive rowers from 36 boats completed measures of self-oriented, team-oriented, and team-prescribed perfectionism prior to competing against one another in a 4-day rowing competition. Strong within-boat similarities in the levels of team members’ team-oriented perfectionism supported the existence of collective team-oriented perfectionism at the boat level. Two-level latent growth curve modeling of day-by-day boat performance showed that team-oriented perfectionism positively predicted the position of the boat in mid-competition and the linear improvement in position. The findings suggest that imposing perfectionistic standards on team members may drive teams to greater levels of performance.

Team working is becoming increasingly important in modern organizations due to its beneficial outcomes. A team's performance levels are determined by complex interactions between the attributes of its individual members, the communication and dynamics between members, the working environment, and the team's work tasks. As organizations evolve, so too does the nature of team working. During the past two decades, product development in engineering organizations has increasingly been undertaken by multidisciplinary integrated product teams. Such increasing complexity means that the nature of research methods for studying teams must also evolve. Accordingly, this paper proposes an agent-based modeling approach for simulating team working within an engineering environment, informed by research conducted in two engineering organizations. The model includes a number of variables at an individual level (competency, motivation, availability, response rate), team level (communication, shared mental models, trust), and task level (difficulty, workflow), which jointly determine team performance (quality, time to complete the task, time spent working on the task). In addition to describing the model's development, the paper also reports the results of various simulation runs that were conducted in response to realistic team working scenarios, together with its validation. Finally, the paper discusses the model's practical applications as a tool for facilitating organizational decision making with respect to optimizing team working.

This essay focuses on two broad areas of work team research: team cognition and team decision-making. Of central concern to both research topics is how team information is processed and how members share information. I draw on themes from the team cognition and team decision-making literature to support a claim that team interactions are punctuated by moments of truth during which unique, relevant, and as yet unshared information may-or-may not become available to the group. I will define these moments in team information processing as inflection points and provide a conceptual framework for the construct. The essay concludes with a hypothesis that inflection points are a perceptible group-level phenomenon related to team effectiveness, setting the stage for a research program dedicated to substantiating the meaning and efficacy of the construct.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to document and analyze the case of a public sector organization in the Gulf region, in which Arab-expatriate relations worked well and sustained a positive and high-performing organizational climate.

Design/methodology/approach – The research employed an embedded ethnographic approach to produce a case analysis of expatriate-local work relations.

Findings – The study found that although there may be multiple sources of difference and potential conflict between Arab locals and expatriates in the workplace, there are circumstances where the effects of such divisions are neutralized, and a positive work environment is sustained. The paper identifies the key sources of division, and social cohesion, and shows how – in this case – these factors interacted so that the negative impact of cultural difference was neutralized, and good working relations were achieved.

Originality/value – The paper is new in two respects. It is the first ethnographic study of Arab-expatriate work relations in a public sector organization in Oman. It is also the first paper to identify, and distinguish between, the factors emphasizing alterity between Arab and expatriate workers, and those encouraging social cohesion.

This essay discusses interdisciplinary research in the context of science policy and the practice of science. Comparisons between interdisciplinary research and other forms of cross-disciplinary research are made, and a brief discussion of the development of the concept of interdisciplinarity is provided. The overarching thesis of this essay is that interdisciplinary research is team research, that is, research conducted by a team. This notion is developed via recent policy discussions of team science and the need to understand interdisciplinary research in action. The author shows how it may be possible to consider the implementation of principles from teamwork and team training to improve interdisciplinary research and the practice of team science.

The aim of this study was to investigate multiprofessional collaboration as well as collaboration between professionals and challenging students and their parents in which the focus for these collaborations was on handling the challenging students’ academic and social behavior. A grounded theory study of collaboration between a prereferral resource team and teachers, principals, challenging students, and their parents was conducted. Qualitative interview and focus group methods were used. The findings presented a grounded theory of collaborative synchronizing in relation to challenging students around two ideal types, human resource synchronizing and human resource desynchronizing.

In this paper we advance team theory by describing how cognition occurs across the distribution of members and the artifacts and technology that support their efforts. We draw from complementary theorizing coming out of cognitive engineering and cognitive science that views forms of cognition as external and extended and integrate this with theorizing on macrocognition in teams. Two frameworks are described that provide the groundwork for advancing theory and aid in the development of more precise measures for understanding team cognition via focus on artifacts and the technologies supporting their development and use. This includes distinctions between teamwork and taskwork and the notion of general and specific competencies from the organizational sciences along with the concepts of offloading and scaffolding from the cognitive sciences. This paper contributes to the team cognition literature along multiple lines. First, it aids theory development by synthesizing a broad set of perspectives on the varied forms of cognition emerging in complex collaborative contexts. Second, it supports research by providing diagnostic guidelines to study how artifacts are related to team cognition. Finally, it supports information systems designers by more precisely describing how to conceptualize team-supporting technology and artifacts. As such, it provides a means to more richly understand process and performance as it occurs within sociotechnical systems. Our overarching objective is to show how team cognition can both be more clearly conceptualized and more precisely measured by integrating theory from cognitive engineering and the cognitive and organizational sciences.

In this research, an extension of a dyadic (pair) team cognition model is proposed to describe the cognition of a team with more than two persons. This model provides a comprehensive framework for analysing the cognitive aspects of team interactions, such as team situation awareness, team memory, and human-agent interactions. One important aspect discussed in this research is a process called mental subgrouping. In a team with more than two persons, for each member to think of the other members as a single entity instead of several different individuals is natural. This behaviour is defined as mental subgrouping. By incorporating mental subgrouping into the mutual belief model, this research attempts to more accurately describe the cognition of a team from the perspective of both an outsider and the individual team members.

RESUMEN: La presente investigación explora las percepciones que los alumnos tienen del trabajo interpersonal y forma parte de un proyecto más amplio que analiza el papel de la regulación conjunta en la autorregulación del aprendizaje. En general, los estudiantes piensan que en el trabajo interpersonal: 1) El maestro juega un papel muy activo en la facilitación del proceso, 2) la forma como se estructura puede favorecer o entorpecer el desarrollo de determinadas habilidades cognitivas y 3) la interacción desarrolla en ellos una tendencia natural a la socialización.

Designers may disagree about the precise definition of design thinking, but few would contest the idea that design thinking is a powerful enabler of innovation productivity. By employing methods and processes that derive from design thinking, innovation teams increase the rate at which good ideas are generated and the likelihood that they are successfully brought to market. Design thinking, most agree, enables businesses to make better decisions by prescribing improved processes and principles for solving problems. Process improvement gets too much of the attention, however. Process outcomes are only as good as the thousands of everyday decisions made by people within the process. That’s a problem because people are highly prone to cognitive biases and emotion-driven reasoning that contribute to poor decision-making. We are especially prone to decision-making traps when we believe there is the potential for significant gain or loss, and when uncertainty is high – precisely when design thinking purports to be most useful. Research has shown, for example, that most people, especially those in leadership positions, are overly optimistic about certain issues. Over-optimism is what permits innovation to happen – if people rationally considered the failure rates for startups and new products, far fewer would

This review paper addresses issues in how healthcare providers search, obtain, and share resources in provider teams. Based in part on a System of Systems (SoS) analysis of provider coordination and resource flows, this paper expands the concepts of resource foraging theory and event dynamics to develop systematic methods for studying healthcare provider coordination. Process flow and human factors emphases from industrial engineering are used to address critical concerns of single-scale and multi-scale performance in healthcare delivery settings. Provider strategies for acquiring the information and resources needed for successful healthcare delivery are dependent on interactions between task requirements, time constraints, and provider coordination processes, as well as limitations of information and resource flow capabilities. These improved definitions and measures will enhance engineers' ability to contribute to improved patient care timeliness, effectiveness, quality, and safety.

This review paper addresses issues in how healthcare providers search, obtain, and share resources in provider teams. Based in part on a System of Systems (SoS) analysis of provider coordination and resource flows, this paper expands the concepts of resource foraging theory and event dynamics to develop systematic methods for studying healthcare provider coordination. Process flow and human factors emphases from industrial engineering are used to address critical concerns of single-scale and multi-scale performance in healthcare delivery settings. Provider strategies for acquiring the information and resources needed for successful healthcare delivery are dependent on interactions between task requirements, time constraints, and provider coordination processes, as well as limitations of information and resource flow capabilities. These improved definitions and measures will enhance engineers' ability to contribute to improved patient care timeliness, effectiveness, quality, and safety.

What can insights from psychological science contribute to interdisciplinary research, conducted  by individuals or by interdisciplinary teams? Three articles shed light on this by focusing on the micro- (personal), meso- (inter-personal), and macro- (team) level. This Introduction (and Table of Contents) to the 'Special Section on Interdisciplinary Collaborations' offers a brief description of the conference session that was the point of departure for two of the three articles. Frank Kessel and Machiel Keestra organized a panel session for the March 2015 meeting of the International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS) in Amsterdam, which was the  titled “Theoretical and Methodological Contributions of Inter/Trans-Disciplinarity (ID/TD) to Successful Integrative Psychological Science.” Machiel Keestra's article analyses how metacognition and philosophical reflection complement each other by making scholarly experts aware of their cognitive processes and representations. As such, these processes contribute to individual and team interdisciplinary research. Hans Dieleman's article proposes a transdisciplinary hermeneutics that acknowledges the embodied nature of cognition and contributes to richer and more creative interdisciplinary knowledge production. The article by Lash-Marshall, Nomura, Eck & Hirsch was added later and continues by focusing on the macro-level of institutional and team arrangements and the role of facilitative leadership in supporting interdisciplinary team research. The original conference panel session's introduction by Frank Kessel and the contribution on the Toolbox Project's dialogue method by Michael O'Rourke are briefly described as well. Together, this Special Section on Interdisciplinary Collaboration offers a wide variety of insights in and practical instructions for successfully conducting interdisciplinary research.

What can insights from psychological science contribute to interdisciplinary research, conducted by individuals or by interdisciplinary teams? Three articles shed light on this by focusing on the micro- (personal), meso- (inter-personal), and macro- (team) level. This Introduction (and Table of Contents) to the 'Special Section on Interdisciplinary Collaborations' offers a brief description of the conference session that was the point of departure for two of the three articles. Frank Kessel and Machiel Keestra organized a panel session for the March 2015 meeting of the International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS) in Amsterdam, which was the titled “Theoretical and Methodological Contributions of Inter/Trans-Disciplinarity (ID/TD) to Successful Integrative Psychological Science.” Machiel Keestra's article analyses how metacognition and philosophical reflection complement each other by making scholarly experts aware of their cognitive processes and representations. As such, these processes contribute to individual and team interdisciplinary research. Hans Dieleman's article proposes a transdisciplinary hermeneutics that acknowledges the embodied nature of cognition and contributes to richer and more creative interdisciplinary knowledge production. The article by Lash-Marshall, Nomura, Eck & Hirsch was added later and continues by focusing on the macro-level of institutional and team arrangements and the role of facilitative leadership in supporting interdisciplinary team research. The original conference panel session's introduction by Frank Kessel and the contribution on the Toolbox Project's dialogue method by Michael O'Rourke are briefly described as well. Together, this Special Section on Interdisciplinary Collaboration offers a wide variety of insights in and practical instructions for successfully conducting interdisciplinary research.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into cross-functional team (CFT) members’ points of view on knowledge integration. Design/methodology/approach This study was conducted using Q methodology. The 22 respondents were members of CFTs in information systems development within 7 agencies of the Flemish Government administration. Findings The study resulted in three distinct perspectives. To the CFT player, the benefits and added value of information and knowledge diversity of CFTs outweigh the challenges of knowledge integration. By contrast, the CFT sceptic is doubtful that knowledge integration in CFTs can ever work at all. Finally, the organization critic highlights the lack of support from the organization for efficient and effective knowledge integration in CFTs. Research limitations/implications The findings of this study suggest that CFT configurations have important implications for the development of shared team mental models and for teams’ cognitive perfo...

This conceptual review review looks at the different types of conflict relating to teams and small groups. Team conflict is represented as a multidimensional construct consisting of three types of conflict: task, relationship, and process conflict. A fourth conflict type has been identified in the literautre, cognition conflict. Unfortunately, the measures for cognition conflict were the same as those used for either task or relationship conflict in other studies. This resulted in a change in lexicon only with no new construct to the conflict literature. The current paper introduces a new conflict construct, cognition conflict, with its intended meaning presenting this construct as distinctively different from the other conflict construct (task, relationship, and process conflict). This conceptual review addresses the call to researchers from Song, Dyer, and Thieme (2006) in which identification for new types of conflict were made, identifying team cognition conflict as a new team conflict construct.