Research On The Relationship Between Shared Mental Models And Team Performance

Because of the ever more intense competition in the market place, increasing number of organizations start to adopt team as their working unit. Accordingly, how to improve the performance of working teams became the issue of popular concern. In the field of management, organizational behavior and psychology, team performance has for long been a focus issue. Recently, some researchers attempted to re-exam the mechanism of team process in a cognitive perspective. Among these researchers, Camion developed the concept of "shared mental model"(SMM), trying to explain, to predict and to improve team performance with it. Despite of several researches on SMM, few are focused on the evolvement process of it and the dynamical relationship between SMM and team performance. In this paper, we attempt to analyze the relationship between SMM and team performance in a longitudinal perspective.We used a top management simulation game as the experimental task, and the results indicated that: 1) The indicators of different kinds of SMM (task model, team member model and process model) displayed upward trends in the decision making process; 2) The relationship between the SMM and team performance is complicated; 3) The relationship between SMM and team performance is changing through the decision process. Based on the results, we propose a multilevel dynamical relationship between SMM and decision performance.