Critical decisions are made every day by teams of individuals who must coordinate their activities to achieve effectiveness. Researchers recently suggested that a shared mental model (SMM) among team members may help them to make successful decisions. Several avenues for developing SMMs in teams exist, one of which is planning. We explored the relationship between team planning, SMMs, and coordinated team decision making and performance. Results indicated that effective planning increased the SMM among team members, allowed them to utilize efficient communication strategies during high-workload conditions, and resulted in improved coordinated team performance. In addition, the communication strategy alone affected the degree of coordinated performance attained by teams during periods of increased workload. Implications of these results and team functioning are discussed. Actual or potential applications of this research include performance and training in settings that require interdependent actions among operators.

SummaryThe present paper reports data from two studies that utilized a card sorting approach to measuring mental model similarity in naturalistic training environments. Results from the ®rst study indicated that higher ranking navy personnel held mental models of teamwork that were more similar to an empirically derived model of expert team performance than lower ranking personnel. Furthermore, comparisons of mental model similarity within groups of high and low ranking trainees and within groups of high and low experience trainees indicated greater similarity between those of higher rank and between those with greater experience. The second study tested the effects of a computer-based training (CBT) strategy that was designed to develop teamwork mental models that were more similar to the`expert model' described in Study 1. Using the same card sorting approach, positive training effects were demonstrated on similarity to the expert model, similarity to other trainees, and consistency.

Crew resource management (CRM) has been the most widely used instructional strategy to enhance teamwork skills within aviation. However, few studies have provided empirical evidence that this strategy results in increased use of teamwork behaviors. The current paper describes 2 evaluation studies of CRM training that were conducted with 96 naval aviators and followed a multiple assessment approach. Results indicated that highly experienced aviators benefited from the training, which focused on increasing the use of several critical teamwork skills. These rare evaluation data suggest that CRM training is a viable strategy for improving teamwork in the cockpit. Implications for team training are discussed.

One of the most troublesome dynamics evident in the airplane cockpit is related to patterns of authority relations between the captain and the first officer: Too often, captains fail to listen and first officers fail to speak. The authors propose that many instances of superordinate and subordinate behavior in the cockpit—the captain's tendency to reject input from other team members and the first officer's hesitancy to question the captain—represent cases of status generalization. First, the authors describe the theory of status generalization and show support for the operation of the theory by presenting examples of flightcrew behavior that the theory predicts. Second, an initial empirical test was conducted to instantiate the claim that captain–first officer differences can be seen as status differences. Finally, the significance and implications of this perspective are discussed.

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