Modeling macro-cognitive influence on information sharing between members of a joint team

Abstract

Research exploring the effectiveness of joint military teams lacks the empirical robustness found in similar multicultural team research from the business domain. This research study broadens the study of effective military teams through an assessment of the factors that influence a joint team's effectiveness by capitalizing on the business and psychological communities' exploration of successful team performance. Specifically, in three empirical studies, this research examines several key elements of poor team effectiveness identified by the business community, namely cultural differences and personality stereotypes. Study One examined cultural orientation and service personality using a survey instrument. The results show that cultural and personality differences exist at significant levels between the services. The second study examined team information sharing processes in a wargame environment composed of homogeneous and heterogeneous four-person teams. The results revealed that participants in heterogeneous teams, cued to the presence of cultural and personality differences among team members, performed as well as homogeneous teams. The third study expands the knowledge space of the team experiment by developing an agent-based model replicating the wargame. The model accurately represented the experimental data, confirming our hypothesis that computational models coded with actual data sets from human experimentation are more robust than models coded with notional data sets. The results demonstrate that joint team effectiveness improves by incorporating methodologies used in the business and simulation science communities.