The Effects Of Shared Mental Model Transformation On Team Performance In Dynamic Team Decision Making

Nowadays, the social environment changes day after day and the competition become more and more fiercely. Organizations face increasingly complex issues. Team decision-making became more and more popular instead of individual decision-making in the organization. Meanwhile, the researchers focus on the process of team decision-making. Most of the researchers intend to reveal factors which affect the team performance and cognitive approach is the mainstream of team decision-making. Cannon-Bowers et al proposed the notion of Shared Mental Model (SMM) to explain the cognitive process of team decision-making.Many studies confirmed that there was positive relation between shared mental model and team performance. However, there were some limitations in these studies. First, researchers didn't study the evolution of shared mental model in dynamic decision-making. Second, shared mental model is a potential psychological variable, there should be some mediate variable between shared mental model and team performance.In this study, we use laboratory simulation combat missions to explore the evolution of shared mental model and the relation between shared mental model and team performance on the basis of hierarchical team with distributed expertise and shared mental model theory. The results of the study showed that shared mental model developed as the task processing, and it gradually developed in the later part of the decision-making task. Moreover there was interaction between leader manner and feedback. We also found that shared mental model affected team proactive collaboration which affected team performance further in the early stage of the task. Along with the task, proactive collaboration got stable and the relation between share mental model and proactive collaboration gradually weakened. Meanwhile, the relation between proactive collaboration and team performance weakened, team performance improved difficultly and there may be some other factors affect team performance when the team changes to the expert team.