Organizational Structure, Information Load, and Communication in Navy Teams

Abstract

Models developed to study and evaluate innovative organizational structures predict organizations with an intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) coordinator will be superior in performance to organizations without such a coordinator, especially when information load is high. We examined the effect of the presence or absence of an ISR coordinator and information load on mission performance employing a moderate fidelity man-in-the-loop simulation. Counter to the modeling predictions the organization with an ISR coordinator was not superior in performance to an organization without an ISR coordinator. However, analysis of the Email/Intel message traffic showed organizations with an ISR coordinator to be superior in situation assessment and awareness. When these latter results are coupled with results showing a steep and significant improvement curve between trials 1 and 2 for the organization with an ISR coordinator, we surmise that if teams are given more practice and familiarization with novel organizations, empirical results will confirm the model predictions.