| In contemporary organisations, teams are becoming increasingly important due to the growing complexity of the business environment. Recent research studies demonstrate that team cognitions exert more influence on team effectiveness than do demographic factors. The team mental model (TMM) is an important construct of team cognitions. In a team, members interact with one another, and knowledge, meanings and beliefs are shared within the team. These elements constitute TMMs. Being collectively constructed, TMMs are complex, dynamic and often context-specific. Existing designs for mapping TMMs have not sufficiently addressed these characteristics.;This study aims to create and develop a new design to map TMMs in their contexts. A Design-based Research (DBR) is adopted. Three rounds of designs are generated, each of which has been implemented with four Six Sigma teams in an international company. The first design introduced a Sensemaking Workshop to elicit the key concepts, and adopted similarity ratings to visualise the inter-relatedness of these teamwork concepts. The second design adopted a collective storytelling technique to derive TMMs. Based on the feedback from these two designs, the third design introduced a narrative simulation to map TMMs. Stories were collected in a group setting and reviewed by team members against ten important dimensions. Correspondence Analysis was applied to visualise relationships between the stories, the key dimensions, as well as those between the stories and the dimensions. A meta-analysis was conducted to synthesize the findings. The results show that high performance teams share more similar mental models within the team than average teams do, and that TMMs in high performance teams reveal stronger interrelationships between teamwork concepts.;This study is significant as it attempts to deal with the complex aspects in TMMs from a constructivist perspective, which has not been adequately addressed before. Design principles describing how to map TMMs were generated. This study also contributes to the emerging branch of cognitive engineering as it goes beyond the primary focus of traditional industrial engineering which is mainly concerned with individual workers interacting with mechanical technologies. The present study branches out towards a scientific study of cooperative work among employees in a socio-technical system. |
