Influence of Resource Allocation on Teamwork and Team Performance Within Self-Organizing Teams

A critical challenge to our nation’s Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) community is the complex task of identifying clandestine networks in cultural “clutter” for counter-terror / counter- insurgency operations. MIT Lincoln Laboratory has developed an ISR “Red/Blue” exercise in which teams work to uncover a complex “Red” network within a simulated urban environment. Teams use wide-area persistent surveillance data and decision support tools to trace relationships between individuals, events, and sites. This exercise was used to investigate the influence of resources on teamwork and performance, modeling the activity as a two-stage decision process, and using Signal Detection Theory (SDT) as a framework to describe performance at each stage and derive metrics to describe teamwork. Team performance and teamwork were investigated within the naturalistic behavior of self-organizing teams, comprising of different organization structures, teamwork behaviors, and communication interactions that were promoted by resource allocation. The affordances provided by available resources drove the mechanisms for communication and collaboration that distinguished the different team types. The research was executed in two phases. Phase 1 involved 46 teams, of varying team size (1, 3, 4, 6, 8) and number of computers per team (1, 2, 3, 4, 6). Results from Phase 1 showed that increasing resources (people and computers) had the potential to improve performance, but once team size grew beyond an optimal size, it caused degradation in performance. Phase 1 also showed that balanced communication interactions amongst team members were indicative of better teamwork. This phase also demonstrated that the exercise, as a two-stage process, could be decomposed into taskwork and teamwork components. Phase 2 extended the study by focusing on the teamwork component of the process within 3-person teams. By holding the team size variable constant, the investigation specifically studied the effect of resource allocation (1, 2, or 3 computers) on teamwork, organization, and performance. Phase 2 results showed that providing each team member his/her own information source (computer), which provided each person the direct ability to produce and process information, resulted in improved teamwork and performance. The indication, then, in designing high performing teams, would be to facilitate each person’s ability to acquire, generate, process, and share their own information as active contributors to the team process and performance.