Cognition and communication: situational awareness and tie preservation in disrupted task environments

Abstract

Individuals filling specialized, interdependent organizational roles achieve coordinated task execution through effective communication channels. Such channels enable regular access to information, opportunities, and assistance that may enhance one’s understanding of the task environment. However, the time and effort devoted to maintaining those channels may detract from one’s duties by turning attention away from the task environment. Disrupted task environments increase information requirements, thus creating a dilemma in which individuals must sustain benefits offered by important communication channels and relieve burdens imposed by ineffective channels. Using separable temporal exponential random graph models (STERGMs), this paper examines the relationship between situational awareness (SA) and the propensity to sustain or dissolve preexisting communication channels during 10 disruptive events experienced sequentially by a large, multifaceted military organization during a 2-week training exercise. Results provide limited evidence that increased SA detracts from tie preservation; instead SA begins to predict tie preservation during the second week of the exercise. Patterns of organizational adaptation reveal that, over time, improvised coordinative roles increasingly fall upon those with elevated SA. These results suggest that over successive disruptions, the benefits of information provided by communication channels within interdependent, role-specialized organizations begin to outweigh the costs of sustaining those channels.