The Effect of a Team Strategy Discussion on Military Team Performance

Abstract

In modern military operations, people from diverging backgrounds often have to work together in ad hoc teams. These team members are often well trained to perform their own part of the teamwork. However, for optimal performance they should also act as a team. The question is how optimal team performance can be realized swiftly. In this study we investigated the effect of a brief team strategy discussion. We hypothesized that a brief team strategy discussion in an ad hoc team at the start of a mission has a significant positive effect on the development of a shared mental model, on team processes, and with that on team performance. In an experimental setting, 46 four-person military ad hoc teams were presented with the distributed dynamic decision-making task. We gave half of the teams an instruction to develop a team strategy in 10 minutes, whereas the other half received no such instruction. Teams were randomly assigned to the two conditions. The results supported our hypotheses. A further exploration of the data showed that the teams in the team strategy condition showed more initiative and leadership. Finally, we concluded that accuracy gained more from the team strategy discussion than speed of operations. The results have important implications for military training and practice.

Notes

¹Although we do not have transcripts of the exact conversations that took place in each of the experimental teams, we did observe the strategy discussions. In these teams, issues like how to divide tasks (i.e., monitoring the area, identifying targets, attacking targets) and how to use platforms optimally dominated the discussion. Undoubtedly there was variance in the quality of the teams' discussions, in the level of structure that characterized the discussions, and in the extent to which teams were able to reach agreement. Most of the teams had finished their discussions within the 10 minutes that were provided.

²Because the current study was part of a larger program of research, we varied the complexity of the task teams by either keeping the value of the U-tracks constant throughout the task or changing this value three times during the task. This manipulation was not of interest to the current study and did not influence the effects of the team strategy discussion on team processes and performance that we were interested in the current study. No interaction effects were found on any of the measures reported here. Because we can therefore conclude that keeping the value of the U-tracks constant or not only explained unique variance in team processes and performance, and not variance that was shared with the manipulation of team strategy discussion, we did not include this manipulation in the analyses reported here.

³Two members of one team had relevant experience with the DDD task prior to the experiment. One team's mean age was 2.6 SD below the mean age of all teams. Two teams did not achieve a final score due to system failure. One team had an offensive score 2.3 SD below the mean offensive score of all teams.

⁴Nine team members of different teams missed one or two items.

*p < .05 (two-tailed).

**p < .01 (two-tailed).