It is hypothesized that highly effective teams adapt to stressful situations by using effective coordination strategies. Such teams draw on shared mental models of the situation and the task environment as well as mutual mental models of interacting team members' tasks and abilities to shift to modes of implicit coordination, and thereby reduce coordination overhead. To test this hypothesis, we developed and implemented a team-training procedure designed to train teams to adapt by shifting from explicit to implicit modes of coordination and choosing strategies that are appropriate during periods of high stress and workload conditions. Results showed that the adaptation training significantly improved performance from pre- to posttraining and when compared with a control group. Results also showed that several underlying team process measures exhibited patterns indicating that adaptive training improved various team processes, including efficient use of mental models, which in turn improved performance. The implication of these findings for team adaptive training is discussed. This research spawned the adaptive architectures for a command and control project investigating adaptive models that focus on changes in the structural and process architecture of large organizations. The research also produced a cadre of integrated performance assessment tools that have been used in training and diagnostic settings, and new components for a team training package focused on effective coordination in high-performance teams.

To function effectively, a team must act as an information-processing unit, maintaining an awareness of the situation or context in which it is functioning and acquiring and using information to act in that situation. This team cognition differs from individual cognition, of course, because each team member acts as an individual information processor. For a team to act in concert to achieve common goals, the team must have shared information about both the situation and the other team members. Team cognition thus requires communication-a process that has no direct analog in individual cognition-in order for the team to build and maintain a shared mental model of the situation. Because communication is essential to team performance, effective team cognition has a communication "overhead" associated with the exchange of information among team members. Communication requires both time and cognitive resources, and, to the extent that communication can be made less necessary or more efficient, team performance can benefit as a result.The team experiment efforts reported here were sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR) and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL). We would like to express our appreciation for the support and review of Willard Vaughan and Gerald Malecki at ONR and Sam Schiflett and Linda Elliott at AFRL.

Interruptions have been defined as a breach of the "turn-taking" contract in interpersonal communication. The relation between a speaker's personality and his or her propensity to interrupt was examined in 30-min unstructured conversations for 36 dyads (12 male, 12 female, and 12 mixed sex). The following predictions were made: (a) Interruptive behavior is inversely related to speech anxiety and positively related to confidence as a speaker; (b) interruptive behavior is inversely related to social anxiety (avoidance-distress; fear of negative evaluation). A stepwise multiple regression analysis was performed, controlling for the systematic effects of sex, the conversational partner's personality and amount of speech, and the speaker's use of back-channel responses. These hypotheses were confirmed for rate of total interruptions and rate of successful interruptions, for percentage of successful interruptions, and for mean duration of interruptions; the results withstood cross-validation analysis.

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Teams with records of superior performance have one common critical characteristic: they are extremely adaptive to varying task demands. These teams were observed to switch between several different coordination strategies and organizational structures, with different lines of authority, communication patterns, and task responsibilities, as they move between normal operations and high-tempo or emergency situations. Two questions are central to the issue: What are the effects of external stressors on team performance, and what are the mechanisms by which teams of decision-makers cope with stress? Our main hypothesis is that team coordination strategies evolve from explicit coordination under low workload conditions to implicit coordination as workload increases. To illustrate these ideas, this paper presents findings from an experimental study on the effects of stress on the performance of command teams. The computer-based experimental task simulates operations in a naval environment in which a hierarchical team of four decision-makers must coordinate complex and ambiguous information to make identifications on air targets. Three task-related stressors–time-pressure, uncertainty, and ambiguity-, and one information-structural variable were manipulated in a within-subject, full-factorial design. Results show some complex patterns of the way the different stressors combine to generate stress and affect the team decision and coordination strategies. Implicit coordination patterns, anticipatory behavior, and redirection of the team communication strategy are evident under conditions of increased time-pressure. Discrepancy between the subordinates' and the team leader's mental model of the costs of errors generates non-trivial patterns of error-making in the teams. The team leader's periodic update had a stabilizing effect on the team communication strategy. Different implementations of team training interventions to enhance mutual anticipation, prevent inadequate adaptation to stress, and foster implicit coordination in command teams are proposed.