Team Communication in Pre-Mission Briefs and Effectiveness in Distributed Action Teams

Abstract

Workplace research suggests that roughly equal communication between teammates is positively associated with team effectiveness. A distinction between teams in these studies and distributed action teams is the degree of role specialization and context-driven communication which may entail unequal degrees of communication. Yet, distributed action teams may have more equal footing to provide inputs in contexts such as mission planning or briefings. Twenty-two ad hoc teams participated in a simulated ground combat vehicle task in which teams conducted six-missions and briefed before each mission. We used team performance, team situation awareness, team workload, and team resilience as team effectiveness criteria. Balanced degrees of communication in mission briefs were correlated with performance and resilience measures, and largely uncorrelated with situation-awareness and workload measures. The overall amount of communication was also largely uncorrelated with all effectiveness measures. The results suggest that communication balance in mission briefs may help predict effectiveness in action teams.

Practical guidance for human-machine teaming assurance of AI-enabled systems

“…For more mature systems, operational tests may employ mixed method approaches including operators' subjective assessments as well as unobtrusive measures of HMT [37]. Approaches for unobtrusive measures of HMT were not included in the HMT assurance toolkit because they are nascent and, in their current state, supplemental to primary forms of evidence generated from more interactive methods.…”