The influence of teammates ' shared mental models on team processes and performance was tested using 56 undergraduate dyads who "flew " a series of missions on a personal-computer-based flight-combat simulation. The authors both conceptually and empirically distinguished between teammates' task- and team-based mental models and indexed their convergence or "sharedness " using individually completed paired-comparisons matrices analyzed using a network-based algorithm. The results illustrated that both shared-team- and task-based mental models related positively to subsequent team process and performance. Furthermore, team processes fully mediated the relationship between mental model convergence and team effectiveness. Results are discussed in terms of the role of shared cognitions in team effectiveness and the applicability of different interventions designed to achieve such convergence. Increased technology has contributed to the complexity of many tasks performed in the workplace, making it difficult for employ-ees to complete their work independently. In response to the technological advances, many organizations have adopted a team approach to work. Teams are viewed as being more suitable for complex tasks because they allow members to share the workload, monitor the work behaviors of other members, and develop and contribute expertise on subtasks. An abundance of research has been conducted on the factors that contribute to high team perfor-mance (for reviews, see Gist, Locke, & Taylor, 1987; Salas, Dickinson, Converse, & Tannenbaum, 1992). One variable that has recently received much theoretical attention concerns the in-

The Enron email corpus is appealing to researchers because it is a) a large scale email collection from b) a real organization c) over a period of 3.5 years. In this paper we contribute to the initial investigation of the Enron email dataset from a social network analytic perspective. We report on how we enhanced and refined the Enron corpus with respect to relational data and how we extracted communication networks from it. We apply various network analytic techniques in order to explore structural properties of the networks in Enron and to identify key players across time. Our initial results indicate that during the Enron crisis the network had been denser, more centralized and more connected than during normal times. Our data also suggests that during the crisis the communication among Enron’s employees had been more diverse with respect to people’s formal positions, and that top executives had formed a tight clique with mutual support and highly brokered interactions with the rest of organization. The insights gained with the analyses we perform and propose are of potential further benefit for modeling the development of crisis scenarios in organizations and the investigation of indicators of failure.

SUMMARY—Teams of people working together for a common purpose have been a centerpiece of human social organization ever since our ancient ancestors first banded together to hunt game, raise families, and defend their communities. Human history is largely a story of people working together in groups to explore, achieve, and conquer. Yet, the modern concept of work in large organizations that developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is largely a tale of work as a collection of individual jobs. A variety of global forces unfolding over the last two decades, however, has pushed organizations worldwide to restructure work around teams, to enable more rapid, flexible, and adaptive responses to the unexpected. This shift in the structure of work has made team effectiveness a salient organizational concern. Teams touch our lives everyday and their effectiveness is important to well-being across a wide range of societal functions. There is over 50 years of psychological research—literally thousands of studies—focused on understanding and influencing the processes that underlie team effectiveness. Our goal in this monograph is to sift through this voluminous literature to identify what we know, what we think we know, and what we need to know to improve the effectiveness of work groups and teams. We begin by defining team effectiveness and establishing the conceptual underpinnings of our approach to understanding it. We then turn to our review, which concentrates primarily on topics that have well-developed theoretical and empirical foundations, to ensure that our conclusions and recommendations are on firm footing. Our review begins by focusing on cognitive, motivational/affective, and behavioral team processes—processes that enable team members to combine their resources to resolve task demands and, in so doing, be effective. We then turn our attention to identifying interventions, or ‘‘levers,’ ’ that can shape or align team processes and thereby provide tools

Up until now there has been no agreement on what a mental model of a physical system is and how to infer the mental model a person has. This paper describes research aimed at solving these problems by proposing that a Mental Model is a dynamic representation created in WM by combining information stored in LTM (the Conceptual Model of the system) and characteristics extracted from the environment. Three experiments tested hypotheses derived from this proposal. Implications for research on Mental Model are discussed. Mental Models and Working Memory 3 3 The role of Working Memory on measuring Mental Models of physical systems When a person learns to interact with a system it means she/he acquires knowledge about its operation and about the structural relationships between its components. Researchers have called this knowledge the 'Mental Model' of the system (Moran, 1981). The existence of Mental Models, and their importance during the interaction with the system, has been demonstr...

This article develops a theoretical framework of distributed representations to explore the representational properties in group problem solving. The basic principle of distributed representations is that the representational system of a group problem solving task is distributed across the representations of individuals, structure of the task. The framework was used to analyze the distributed representation of the Waitress and Orange task. From this analysis, an experiment was designed to examine group problem solving behaviors under different distributed representations. The experiment shows that (1) different distributed representations across two individuals produced dramatically different group problem solving behaviors even if they had the same abstract structure, and (2) two minds could be better than, not different from, or even worse than one mind, depending on how representations were distributed across the two minds. These results further support the interactionist view of group problem solving, which is that the interactions among individuals can produce group cognitive properties that can neither be reduced to nor be inferred from the cognitive properties of individuals. Group problem solving refers to problem solving activities that involve interactions among a group of individuals. One critical issue in group problem solving is the nature of group properties. One view is that the cognitive properties of a group can be entirely determined by the properties of indi-

doi 10.1287/orsc.1070.0297

This paper addresses two major challenges new product development teams face in making a product people want. The first challenge is to frame the design situation based on a real need of a customer. The second, less obvious, challenge is to get everyone on the team in agreement about what that framing is- everyone needs to be on the same page about what it is they're doing. Yet these two challenges are not independent, they are intertwined with each other, connected by the concrete research and sharing activities the teams perform. We introduce a framework to help understand the path of a design team along these two dimensions as well as illustrations of the three most common paths observed among graduate multidisciplinary new product development teams as supported by interviews and survey data. These case studies form the basis of four themes and twelve design principles to help teams navigate the new product development process.

Coordinating software tasks across geographic locations is difficult because of factors like: limited opportunities for interaction, lack of contextual references, and leaner communication media. Team cognition research suggests that team knowledge helps members coordinate because they can anticipate task issues more accurately, communicate more efficiently and find expertise within the team, among other things. In this field study we investigate one large team of geographically distributed developers collaborating on a software task in a telecommunications firm to better understand how team knowledge influences coordination effectiveness and how this varies with geographic dispersion. Our findings reveal that: software developers have different types of coordination needs; coordination across sites is more challenging than within a site; team knowledge helps members coordinate, but more so when they are separated by geographic distance; and the effect of different types of team knowledge on coordination effectiveness differs between co-located and geographically dispersed collaborators.

Human team members often develop shared expectations to predict each other’s needs and coordinate their behaviors. In this paper the concept “Shared Belief Map ” is proposed as a basis for developing realistic shared expectations among a team of Human-Agent-Pairs (HAPs). The establishment of shared belief maps relies on inter-agent information sharing, the effectiveness of which highly depends on agents ’ processing loads and the instantaneous cognitive loads of their human partners. We investigate HMM-based cognitive load models to facilitate team members to “share the right information with the right party at the right time”. The shared belief map concept and the cognitive/processing load models have been implemented in a cognitive agent architecture— SMMall. A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the concept, the models, and their impacts on the evolving of shared mental models of HAP teams.

Copyright # 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The current experiment explored the effect of activating a counterfactual mind-set on the discussion of unique information and group judgment accuracy. Evidence suggests that a counterfactual mind-set is characterized by a focused, analytic mental state and, when activated at the group level, improves group judgment accuracy in the murder mystery paradigm (a hidden profile task). We hypothesized that the beneficial effect of the counterfactual mind-set would only help group problem-solving tasks if the mind-set had been activated at the group level, allowing the analytical mind-set to play out in an atmosphere of synergistic coordination. In contrast, if this highly focused mental state is activated at the individual level, it could impair group judgment quality because inwardly focused analytical individuals may fail to coordinate their behavior with other group members. Consistent with our hypothesis, activating a counterfactual mind-set at the individual level had a debilitating effect on the group judgment task, whereas activating a counterfactual mind-set at the group level had a facilitative