Role Shifting in Organizational Teams: Grounded Theory and Scale Development

Organizations utilize teams to effectively reach desired goals and performance. An approach to understanding organizational team effectiveness has been through research on team member roles, which refer to the consistent pattern of behavior characteristic of a person in their typical team setting. Research on team member roles has focused on the ability of team members to shift their roles in response to external catalysts (e.g., adapting to a new reward structure); however, research has yet to address internal catalysts to team role shifting (e.g., shifting to reduce role dissatisfaction). The inclusion of research on internal catalysts to team role shifting could be important to team-based organizations, such that potential drivers internal to a team, like member satisfaction, have been related to key organizational factors like counterproductive employee behavior and turnover. Therefore, this dissertation explores the process of role shifting in organizational teams, as well as the potential facilitators and barriers team members have experienced in carrying out a role shift in their team. This current investigation answered five research questions on this topic first by engaging in theory construction using a grounded theory approach. This grounded theory of team role shifting highlights the process individuals take to enact a role shift in their team, as well as the facilitators of and barriers to team role shifting that individuals consider and experience during the process. Next, to make this theory practical in use to organizational teams, a scale measure was developed based on the four types of facilitators and barriers that emerged from grounded theory. Initial results suggest support for a four factor structure based on the four types of facilitators and barriers, as well as supportive reliability and validity evidence. While additional research is needed, the team role shifting measure (TRSM) demonstrates value to organizations by illuminating features of their teams that could potentially impact employee-level and organizational-level outcomes

A 3D mixed reality visualization of network topology and activity results in better dyadic cyber team communication and cyber situational awareness

BackgroundCyber defense decision-making during cyber threat situations is based on human-to-human communication aiming to establish a shared cyber situational awareness. Previous studies suggested that communication inefficiencies were among the biggest problems facing security operation center teams. There is a need for tools that allow for more efficient communication of cyber threat information between individuals both in education and during cyber threat situations.MethodsIn the present study, we compared how the visual representation of network topology and traffic in 3D mixed reality vs. 2D affected team performance in a sample of cyber cadets (N = 22) cooperating in dyads. Performance outcomes included network topology recognition, cyber situational awareness, confidence in judgements, experienced communication demands, observed verbal communication, and forced choice decision-making. The study utilized network data from the NATO CCDCOE 2022 Locked Shields cyber defense exercise.ResultsWe found that participants using the 3D mixed reality visualization had better cyber situational awareness than participants in the 2D group. The 3D mixed reality group was generally more confident in their judgments except when performing worse than the 2D group on the topology recognition task (which favored the 2D condition). Participants in the 3D mixed reality group experienced less communication demands, and performed more verbal communication aimed at establishing a shared mental model and less communications discussing task resolution. Better communication was associated with better cyber situational awareness. There were no differences in decision-making between the groups. This could be due to cohort effects such as formal training or the modest sample size.ConclusionThis is the first study comparing the effect of 3D mixed reality and 2D visualizations of network topology on dyadic cyber team communication and cyber situational awareness. Using 3D mixed reality visualizations resulted in better cyber situational awareness and team communication. The experiment should be repeated in a larger and more diverse sample to determine its potential effect on decision-making