A Preliminary Conceptualization of Shared Mental Models in a Project Team Domain
Abstract
Project teams are routinely used in today's workplace. These teams are typically composed of members representing a variety of different functional units (Cohen & Bailey, 1997). The use of project teams allows organizations to tap the specialized, unique knowledge of these team members concurrently. Teams are able to improve performance when completing complex assignments by utilizing the expertise of each team member to the advantage of the team. While this idea sounds appealing, the implementation is not easy. The functional perspectives of team members are internalized. Even when told to act in the team's best interest, these team members are biased toward the interests of their function (Dearborn & Simon, 1958). The team leader's challenge is to shift the team members' biases from their function to the team. Katzenbach and Smith (1999) have found that successful teams put significant effort into developing an agreed upon approach for conducting the requisite work. In spite of this finding, traditional models of teams and recent work in the field often have ignored the cognitive processes that constitute successful teamwork (Lembke & Wilson, 1998), where teamwork refers to the multitude of processes required to maintain the team such as cooperation, communication, and interpersonal relationships (McIntyre & Salas, 1995). Through the initial stages of development, team members must consider aspects of teamwork that include their fellow team members' potential contributions, the assignment they have been given, and the level of interaction required, which are inherently cognitive processes. Further, the team must achieve cognitive unification regarding the aspects of teamwork unique to their circumstance. Shared mental models (SMM) are useful in assessing how well a team achieves this cognitive unification (Salas, Dickinson, Converse, & Tannenbaum, 1992). In this paper, we present our theoretically based preliminary conceptualization of SMM.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2002
- Accession Number
- ADA515270
Entities
People
- Dara A. Mccomb
Organizations
- University of Massachusetts Amherst