Selma van der Haar

Investigating the relation between team learning and the team situation model.

The development of a team situation model (TSM), a shared understanding of the current situation developed by team members moment by moment, and its impact on team effectiveness have received minor attention in team research. This study investigates a moderated mediation model including the relationship between the team learning processes of co-construction and constructive conflict, the TSM, and team effectiveness. Forty-seven emergency management command-and-control teams participated in this field study. Their task was to manage a realistic emergency simulation developed and organized by field experts. The multi-rater approach included ratings of team members, researchers, and field experts. Results show that co-construction is related to the TSM under the condition of high constructive conflict. The TSM predicts team effectiveness in terms of the quality of actions at the incident scene.

Towards a model for team learning in multidisciplinary crisis management teams

Crisis management teams have the duty to perform immediately, reliably and effectively in case of an emergency, crisis or disaster. The teams are composed of members who are diverse in expertise, experience, parent organisation and familiarity. This makes these teams ad hoc multidisciplinary action teams that have to function as a team and perform in a reliable and effective way as quickly as possible. Our expectation is that team learning is very important for establishing this team performance. In this paper, we develop a broad model of how this team learning occurs in crisis management teams, especially in the operational crisis management team. In summary, we state that reliable and effective performance in these teams requires connectivity about the task and team (i.e., available knowledge and opinions are shared using communication, leading to shared visions and intentions). This connectivity can be established by using team-learning behaviour and face-to-face-communication and developing a Transactive Memory System (TMS), a shared situational awareness, shared mental models of the task and team and a model for how to cooperate in this team. Can this team learning be influenced to improve performance? This is the general question underlying the PhD project that we started in the summer of 2007 at Leiden University.

Evolving team cognition: The impact of team situation models on team effectiveness

In a study of 32 real-life on-scene-command teams, we investigated how the early development of team situation models (TSMs, i.e., a shared understanding in teams of which actions to take) influences final team effectiveness. We used both an inter-team longitudinal approach that examines TSM development at the sample level and an intra-team longitudinal approach that examines TSM development at the level of individual teams. We found that overall TSM change at the early stage of team functioning is positively related to team effectiveness at the end measured by quality of actions and goal achievement. Teams with increasing TSM similarity patterns tend to deliver higher team effectiveness than teams with stable TSM patterns but not than teams with decreasing TSM patterns. We discussed the theoretical and methodological contribution of the article to team cognition research and the practical implications to real-life command-and-control teams.

Team Leader Structuring for Team Effectiveness and Team Learning in Command-and-Control Teams

Due to their crucial and highly consequential task, it is of utmost importance to understand the levers leading to effectiveness of multidisciplinary emergency management command-and-control (EMCC) teams. We argue that the formal EMCC team leader needs to initiate structure in the team meetings to support organizing the work as well as facilitate team learning, especially the team learning process of constructive conflict. In a sample of 17 EMCC teams performing a realistic EMCC exercise, including one or two team meetings (28 in sum), we coded the team leader’s verbal structuring behaviors (1,704 events), rated constructive conflict by external experts, and rated team effectiveness by field experts. Results show that leaders of effective teams use structuring behaviors more often (except asking procedural questions) but decreasingly over time. They support constructive conflict by clarifying and by making summaries that conclude in a command or decision in a decreasing frequency over time.

The professional development of planners, developers and managers of crisis team exercises

In order to be prepared for managing crises and disasters, a series of exercises need to be executed regularly. Municipalities and safety regions in the Netherlands, however, often do not sufficiently recognise this necessity. At the same time, they do not always have available expertise to plan for optimal exercises and other arrangements for professional development. In order to improve this situation, a professional development trajectory for exercise process managers was launched in the Netherlands. This paper reports on the outline of the programme and its implementation. It includes a description of the elements of the programme and the way it was designed. It may be a useful case study for those who are considering upgrading emergency exercise processes in their own context.