Characterizing naval team readiness through social network analysis

Abstract

Characterizing a team’s level of readiness in an efficient and objective way is important for organizations such as the military. Current methods to characterize real-time team interaction know limitations that may be addressed by social network analysis techniques. The purpose of the current field study was to investigate the usefulness of these techniques by applying them to two naval teams, one more experienced than the other. We observed how these teams responded during an actual training exercise to a comparable scenario and recorded their communication processes. The descriptive, non-inferential, results showed that, at the network level, the more experienced team displayed higher levels of information sharing and team member participation compared to the less experienced team. At the actor level, the team coordinator played a much more central role in the more experienced team, whereas in the less experienced team this role was taken up by various other team members.