Team Coordination and Strategies Under Automation

Abstract

This study evaluated the effects of different forms of automation on team communication and coordination in a complex decision making task. Two person teams performed a Theatre Defense task in which they defended a home base from enemy aircraft attack using two networked computer workstations. Four automation conditions were simulated with computer assistance applied to information acquisition, information analysis, and decision making functions across two levels of task difficulty. Dependent measures for the experiment included team performance, counts of different types of verbal communication, team coordination ratings by external observers, and team member subjective workload ratings. Results on coordination ratings, communication counts, and correlations between communication and team effectiveness measures agreed with historical research showing that high performing teams exhibit efficient communication and frequent planning and situation assessments. In general, it was observed that automation conditions that support these behaviors by removing or reducing requirements for continuous verbal information transfer allow more time for sharing of a wider range of situation assessment information and development of more effective team strategies.

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