Communication in Joint Activity : Investigating Teams’ Communication Pattern in a Dynamic Decision Making Environment

Abstract: The complexity in the world is continuously increasing. Teams are faced with imperfect information in uncertain, dynamic, and time critical environments as they strive to make the right decisions, not just as individuals, but as a team. In this joint activity the members choreograph their actions and synchronize their behavior through the use of communication. Communication is the predominant form of interaction within teams – it is not only a window into team cognition – it is an externalized cognitive process at a team level (Letsky, Warner, Fiore & Smith, 2008). In an earlier study, non-professional participants were trained in teams of three to become high-performing within the C3Fire microworld (Baroutsi, Berggren, Nählinder and Johansson, 2013). In this microworld the team members are faced with the dynamic decision problem of fighting a forest fire. They have interdependent roles, requiring them to coordinate and strategize on a team level, making C3Fire a suitable platform for investigating dynamic decision making in teams. These six trained teams were compared to six untrained teams in a final experiment through a variety of measures, showing that the trained teams differed significantly in terms of both performance and in other important team aspects (Baroutsi, Berggren, Johansson, Nählinder, Granlund, Turcotte, & Tremblay, 2014; Berggren, Baroutsi, Johansson, Turcotte, & Tremblay, 2014; Berggren, Johansson, Baroutsi, & Dahlbäck, 2014; Berggren, Johansson, Svensson, Baroutsi, & Dahlbäck, 2014; Baroutsi, Berggren, Johansson, manuscript). These differences were thought to have an impact on the communication shared among the team members. Hence, the purpose of the present report was to investigate how the communication pattern was affected by these differences. The communication was analyzed using a coding scheme that categorized the content of the teams’ utterances. No difference was found in terms of communication frequency between the two types of teams. However, the trained and untrained teams did differ in communication content. The trained teams communicated more frequently about the context and the situation, while the untrained teams communicated more about the activities of the team. This can be interpreted as a deficiency in common ground, directability, and interpredictability (Klein, Feltovich & Bradshaw, 2005) among the untrained teams. Also, the communication content explained 88.3 % of the variance in performance.