In the Mind's Eye Enhancing Human Performance (1991) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 247-270
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From page 247... ...
12 Enhancing Team Performance The enhancement of one person's performance can be viewed in a variety of ways, as is done in the other chapters of this book. In many situations, however -- in sports, the military, the workplace, to name but a few -- people do not perform their tasks alone; rather, they do so in conjunction with other people performing parallel, similar, or complementary tasks.
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have focused on decision making, and the prototype question has been the study of how groups arrive at a consensus. The major model has been a jury, which is an unorganized group whose members possess similar information and who must arrive at a consensus.
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Although the two processes of decision making and performance are intertwined in the functioning of a group, they are often at least conceptually separable. The decision mechanism of a team may be fixed, as in a military unit, but its performance mechanism still needs to be implemented.
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individual performance. The general focus is on interaction processes, organizational structures, and operating procedures that foster and sustain optimal task performance (or fail to do so)
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performance environments that it seems prudent to regard suboptimal team performance as the norm. The critical ingredient in detection has been development of a theoretical baseline relevant to the particular task environment.
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If audiences actively respond, or can be interpreted as valuative in character, the audience-coaction effects just noted are generally exacerbated. Obviously, the nature of the task and setting, as well as such background factors as sex and culture of performers, are important in determining performance facilitation or inhibition.
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how particular techniques would work over a protracted period of time remains unstudied. Information Processing and Coordination Most of the tasks in the audience and coaction environments that have been studied were fairly simple, and the appropriate theoretical performance baseline for evaluating team performance was fairly straightforward: team output was essentially a summation or similar aggregation of members' inputs.
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above, best-member baseline (e.g., Davis et al., 1971) , but so little research has addressed groups organized and trained to the task that little can be said about actually engineering group efficiency in the various contexts in which teams must perform.
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something. The team output is either a recommendation to another decisionmaking authority (e.g., a staff analysis or a personnel committee recommendation)
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Major concerns of team consensus decision making, especially in organizational contexts, have been the balancing of biases and expertise as well as the interests of various constituencies, concerns that have no counterpart in individual performance. A good example of enhancement techniques applied to team decision making comes from group judgmental forecasting, although the following discussion could in principle apply to other team tasks as well (see Davis et al., 1991, for a more general summary)
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in private; and contributions are combined mathematically to yield a team decision (see, e.g., Delbecq et al., 1975)
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Three Field Examples Special Forces The Special Forces branch of the Army uses a squad as its basic operating unit; the typical squad consists of 12 soldiers. Within each squad, two members are trained in each of six specialties, for example, medic, weapons, combat engineering.
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are absent for individual training. What are the best solutions to having incomplete squads: secondary training in other subspecialties for each member to serve as back-up for absent members or the assignment of specialists who are new to the squad to fill in for the missing soldiers?
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there is a simulated control room for each reactor. The simulated control rooms duplicate the instrumentation of their particular reactors, and, through computer models, interact with the instrumentation to produce the effects on the gauges and information displays that would be shown in the actual control room of the modeled reactor.
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made by individuals, so that a consensual agreement at the end of the process, based on the "facts" then in hand, may be flawed by errors or biases introduced along the way. How does one train crews to monitor and provide quality control along the way?
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In groups in which members have different tasks, skills, or functions, what is the optimal division of training for the members in terms of primary and secondary tasks? If a team member spends all of the training time acquiring greater facility on his or her primary task, the member does not get trained in a second specialty and cannot take on the task of a team member who is unavailable when the team must perform.
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of forcing a further specification of the desired outcome and purpose of the training. Challenges to Research Most of the questions from the three work examples are not covered by existing research.
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interactions of actual groups in the workplace. The reasons for this lack are understandable: the financial and logistic difficulties of conducting longitudinal research with experimental groups are so formidable as to preclude it from the consideration of most investigators.
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periods of change in a work task. A field study at an appliance plant, conducted by Schachter et al.
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Research on group problem solving indicates that teams perform at suboptimal levels. While a number of techniques (e.g., the Delphi technique, nominal group technique)
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1970 Use of self-ratings to improve group estimates. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 1(3)
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Gough, R 1975 The effect of group format on aggregate subjective probability distributions.
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Myers, D.B., and H Lamm 1976 The group polarization phenomenon.
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