Shared Mental Models in Military Command and Control Organizations: Effect of Social Network Distance

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation on the relationship between social network distances and shared mental models in military command and control organizations. Previous research has shown that physical distance is the gold standard for high performance (Olson & Olson, 2000). However, social network distance may be equally or more important, as social network graphs inherently take into account the group's context and environment (Krackhart, 1994). We conducted this research on a new 56-member command and control organization using computer-based collaborative tools as they engaged in a five day simulation exercise. As military command and control organizations are difficult to evaluate based on outcome and performance, we chose shared mental models as a proxy. We hypothesized that in a command and control organization, social network distance and physical distance are independent of one another. Further we hypothesized that social network distance would be a predictor of mental model congruence. We found that there is a very weak positive correlation between social network distance and physical distance. Further, we found that, controlling for physical distance, social network distance is a predictor of mental model congruence. This research validates that high frequency of communication, mediated by computer based collaborative tools, can effectively generate shared mental models.

Cultural Evolution in Team Problem Solving

“…This produced a net effect of selecting different memes for each team member. Similarly, other research shows that the amount of communication between team members is a strong predictor, much stronger than physical proximity, of mental model congruence (Graham et al, 2004). In this sense, it is the socio-cognitive isolation that favors divergence of memes in cultural evolution and not the physical separation as in biological systems.…”

Detailed Comparison of America's Army Game and Unit of Action Experiments

“…Among these traits of the top teams, we could see that the received/inflicted damage amount can be predicted by using the ORA measures [8] of communication social networks and the high clanishness representing the common background among team members is the one of the traits of winning teams. Because the UA experiments reveal the importance of communication distance [9] among participants and the common background experience and education, we could conjecture there would be some similarities between two domains because findings from both analyses are similar.…”

“…Because the experiments used SSA as a performance measure, he could discover important elements of SSA through the analyses of the experiments. First, Graham et al [9] discovered there are evident links between SSA and social network distance, physical distance. In the paper, he did a regression analysis with physical distance and social network distance against the mental model congruence that is related to the SSA.…”

“…The main stream of the previous research [9,10,13] on the UA experiment is the analyses of its command and control (C2) structure efficiency. Because the UA experiment has many officers cooperating and communicating to each other, well-established C2 has been considered as a key to the success of the UA experiment.…”

Shared Mental Models and Inter-organizational AEC Project Teams

“…SMM is a well-established theoretical concept in the psychology domain (Mohammed et al, 2010), but when it comes to empirical evidence, there are only a handful of studies that investigate SMM for actual teams in industrial settings. Summarized in Table 1, these studies come from the construction ( Lingard et al, 2015), education (Johnson et al, 2011), engineering (Avnet and Weigel, 2013), information systems (Hsu et al, 2011), military (Graham et al, 2004), plant control (Waller et al, 2004), software development (Levesque et al, 2001), athletics (Blickensderfer et al, 2010), and business management (Smith-Jentsch et al, 2001) fields. Limitations exist in these investigations.…”