Individual Workload's Relation to Team Workload : An investigation

Abstract: There is an ongoing debate regarding the construct of team workload and a central point in that debate is team workload’s relation to individual workload. This study set out to investigate this relationship. To assess the participants workload a microworld called C3Fire was used to simulate a complex control situation in which teams had to cooperate to complete the task of fighting a forest fire. Twelve teams that consisted of four members in each team were recruited. In the microworld each member of the team took on one out of four separate roles and completed three different scenarios with varying degree of difficulty in C3Fire. After each scenario, a number of questionnaires aimed at gauging different aspects of the teams’ experience in the microworld was administered. The questionnaire in focus of the current study was the DATMA questionnaire, which was used to measure individual workload and team workload. To assert the relationship between the two constructs a multiple linear regression was conducted. The results provided showed that individual workload could be used as a significant predictor for modeling team workload. The study therefore concludes that there is evidence for a relationship in which each team members individual workload could be the parts of the total sum of team workload.