Workload Awareness

Abstract

Teams, by definition, perform interdependent tasks that require team members to coordinate their decisions and actions in order to achieve their shared goals (Orasanu and Salas, 1993). In order to successfully achieve the level of coordination that is required for successful interdependent performance, team members need a shared awareness of the situation, and of the roles, tasks, and actions of the other team members. The existence of this “shared mental model ” among team members has been suggested as an explanatory mechanism for effective teams, and, as measured in various ways, has been shown to increase team performance (Cannon-Bowers, Salas, and Converse, 1993; Stout, Cannon-Bowers, Salas, and Milanovich, 1999). Despite its importance, it is difficult to measure the extent to which team members are successful in developing and maintaining a shared, accurate awareness of the situation and of each other’s roles. For distributed teams, with members who are not co-located, it is especially difficult both to develop and maintain this awareness and to measure it. The notion of team mutual awareness – the extent to which team members are informed of other team members’ behaviors – provides a measurable construct for assessing the presence of shared mental models. We propose a model, presented in Figure 1, that specifies three interrelated facets of team performance to provide a structure to assess team mutual awareness. Taskwork awareness refers to awareness of what tasks other team members are completing and how important these tasks are. Workload awareness refers to awareness of the loading that the Taskwork imposes on team members. Teamwork awareness, finally