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Teams are more than just a collection of individuals pursuing their own goals. A commonly accepted definition of teamwork is a collection of (two or more) individuals working together inter-dependently to achieve a common goal (Salas et al., 1992). The structure of a team may range from rigid, with clearly defined roles and a hierarchical chain-of-command, to flexible, where individuals all have similar capabilities, tasks are allocated flexibly to the best available team member, and decisions are made jointly by consensus. While some teams are formed and exist only transiently, other teams are more persistent, training together and operating over an extended duration to solve a series problems or perform many tasks.
The notion of shared goals is essential to teamwork because it is what ties the team together and induces them to take a vested interest in each other’s success, beyond acting in mere self-interest. Members of a team do not just act to achieve their own goals, possibly at the expense of others, but rather they look for synergies that can benefit others and contribute to the most efficient overall accomplishment of the team goal. In addition to this positive cooperativity, members of a team also have incentive to actively try to avoid interfering with each other. Furthermore, commitment to shared goals leads to other important team behaviors, such as backing each other up in cases of failure. For example, if one team member assigned to do a task finds that he is unable to complete it, other members of the team are willing to take over since they ultimately share the responsibility. This produces a high level robustness (fault tolerance) in teams.
Generalizing the argument above, teamwork relies centerally on the concept of mutual awareness. Mutual awareness involves not just knowledge of shared goals, but other static information too, like the structure of the team (e.g. who is playing what role) and what the mission objective and plan for achieving it is, as well as transient information, such as current task assignments, achievement status of intermediate goals (for maintaining coordination), dynamic beliefs about the environment relevant to decision points, what the situation is, resource availability, and so on. To operate effectively, a team must maintain on on-going dialogue to consistently exchange this information, reconcile inconsistencies, and develop a “common picture.” This mutual awareness is often described as a “shared mental model” (Rouse et al., 1992; Cannon-Bowers et al., 1993) in the team psychology literature, and fostering the development and acquisition of a shared mental model among team members is the target of specific training methods such as cross training (Volpe et al., 1996; Blickensderfer et al., 1998; Cannon-Bowers et al., 1998).
These aspects that drive teamwork have important consequences for behavior that makes teams and their performance more than just the sum of their parts. Beyond synergy and coordination, teams can also generate novel solutions to problems that individuals might not be able to alone. Through internal activities such as load-balancing, teams can flexibly respond to changes in the environment. In fact, adaptiveness (including re-allocation of resources as necessary, and even re-configuration of the team structure) is often taken as a sign of the most effective teams (Klein and Pierce, 2001). Hence these behaviors are important to try to simulate to get the most realistic performance out of synthetic teams in constructive simulations. However, accomplishing this relies a great deal on communication among the team members. They must communicate to distribute or assign tasks, update status, seek help, and maintain coordination. Furthermore, communication is needed to exchange information and make decisions. Effective teams combine information from multiple sources of information distributed across multiple sensors to synthesize a common operational picture and assessment of the situation, allowing an appropriate, coordinated response. This is what constitutes the “team mind,” a hypothetical cognitive construct that emerges from the team and makes its behaviors appear as if they were under centralized, unified control (Klein, 1999).
Teams are of course found in many applications domains in addition to military combat. Examples include sports (football, soccer), chess, fire-fighting, urban crisis management and emergency response, hospital care (nursing, ICUs), business, manufacturing, aviation (air-traffic control, cockpit crews), etc.
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