Teamwork

 

A team is a special type of group where members share interdependence on one another. Each member has a different, yet specific role to perform a task. Therefore, teams perform cognitive activities at the team level. Assessments of team cognitive skill should recognize that each member of the team has a unique set of knowledge, skills, and abilities that must be taken into account (Cooke & Gorman, 2005). There are several ways of measuring knowledge distribution and communication with teams, as detailed below.

 

Knowledge Sharing. Team members distribute knowledge across the team. It is possible to measure shared knowledge by assessing representations of each team member in a role-specific standard using Pathfinder (Cook et al., 2000).

 

Holistic elicitation and Communication. It is possible to get information about teamwork through asking work-related questions and gathering relatedness answers from the team. Flow methods focus on the sequence of timing of interactions between members of a team while content methods focus on the meanings of what is being said between team members. These two methods can be used in tandem.

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Cooke, N.J. and Gorman, J.C. (2005). Assessment of team cognition. Karwowski, W (eds.), International encyclopedia of ergonomics and human factors (pp. 270-275). London, England: Taylor & Francis.

 

Cooke, N.J., Salas, E., Cannon-Bowers, J.A., and Stout, R. (2000). Measuring team knowledge. Human Factors, 42, 151-173.