Improving Performance: Should We Support Individuals or Teams?

Abstract

As part of our research program on integration of intelligent agents with human teams, we analyzed the performance of 34 teams (102 subjects) in a target identification task. Teams were assigned to one of four conditions. The control group received no aiding; each agent condition was focused on an alternative strategy: 1) support individual team members by tracking known information; 2) support team communication by automatically passing information to the relevant member; or 3) support team coordination by identifying responsibility for specific data. We found performance improvements for teams across trials under all conditions. Teams using communication and coordination agents performed better on hard targets, although subjects perceived the coordination agent to be the least valuable for teamwork support. Our findings suggest that direct support of teamwork is more beneficial than aiding individual tasks.

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