Gabrielplummer dissertation submission

Northwestern University In a world of their own.Team cognition in long-term cohabitating teams A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Media, Technology, and Society By Gabriel Plummer EVANSTON, ILLINOIS December 2019 2 Abstract Teams such as those that travel in outer space require team members to cohabitate for long periods of time. These teams are unique. Team members not only work together, they live together and in some ways are more like families than work groups. How does long-term cohabitation affect teamwork? These teams, while they are interdependent both functionally and in terms of their team’s goals, have quite different experiences from teams working in an office.

These teams do not have the chance to leave each other and are isolated from any form of external support. I studied 9, 4-person teams living in isolation in the NASA analog HERA (Human Exploration Research Analog) for either 30 or 45 days. Triangulating across multiple methodologies, I glean new insights into team cognition as it develops and affects the performance of these teams. I found that shared task and team mental model similarity tended to increase early in the mission and then stabilize whereas trends in shared vision tended to increase in later phases of the mission.

Additionally, interpersonal stressors had different impacts depending on the type of team cognition: hindrance network density negatively impacting shared team mental model similarity, but positively impacting shared vision. In my fourth chapter, I found that higher team mental model similarity and shared vision were positively related to coordination task performance, but negatively related to creative task performance. These variables had opposite effects for problem solving performance with the former benefitting performance and the latter negatively impacting performance. Additionally, the relationships between these variables depended on whether average levels of team cognitive similarity were used or trends in cognitive similarity leading up to performance.

Average levels were important for creative thinking tasks, but trends in cognitive similarity were more important for problem solving tasks. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Table of Contents 3 List of Tables 4 List of Figures 5 Executive Summary 6 CHAPTER 1 12 General Setting and Methodology 38 CHAPTER 2 41 Method 41 Analyses 42 Results 44 Discussion 60 CHAPTER 3 65 Method 69 Analyses 75 Results 79 Discussion 91 CHAPTER 4 96 Method 100 Analyses 106 Results 108 Discussion 113 CHAPTER 5 117 References 174 4 List of Tables Table 1 Taxonomy characteristics and dimensions 132 Table 2 Taxonomy of team cognition constructs in cohabitating teams 133 Table 3 Category Labels and Definitions of Goals and Challenge Responses 134 Table 4 Average Goal and Challenge Category Rankings Across Missions 135 Table 5 Most Frequently Cited Goal Response Category 136 Table 6 Most Frequently Cited Challenge Response 137 Table 7 Means, standard deviations, and intercorrelations among all study variables 138 Table 8 Variance attributable to team (ICC1) in a 2-level structure (time nested in 139 team) Table 9 Variance attributable to team (ICC1) in a 3-level structure (time nested in 140 individual nested in team) Table 10 Variance attributable to mission week (ICC1) in a 2-level structure (team 141 nested in time) Table 11 Growth models for task mental model similarity 142 Table 12 Growth models for team mental model similarity 143 Table 13 Growth models for shared vision (combined goals and challenges) 144 Table 14 Discontinuous growth models for task mental model similarity 145 Table 15 Discontinuous growth models for team mental model similarity 146 Table 16 Discontinuous growth models for shared vision (combined goals and 147 challenges), df = 250 Table 17 Discontinuous growth models for shared vision (goals) 148 Table 18 Discontinuous growth models for shared vision (challenges) 149 Table 19 The impact of breadth of daily challenges on team cognitive similarity 150 Table 20 The impact of status conflict on team cognitive similarity 151 Table 21 The impact of hindrance network density on team cognitive similarity 152 Table 22 The impact of team cognitive similarity on execute task performance 153 Table 23 The impact of team cognitive similarity slopes on generate task performance 154 Table 24 The impact of average team cognitive similarity on generate task 155 performance Table 25 The impact of team cognitive similarity on team viability 156 Table 26 The impact of team cognitive similarity slopes on choose task performance 157 Table 27 The impact of average team cognitive similarity on choose task performance 158 5 List of Figures Figure 1 Schematic representation of the HERA 159 Figure 2 The nine HERA crews that participated in these studies 160 Figure 3 Proportion of second order category goals over time 161 Figure 4 Proportion of second order category challenges over time 162 Figure 5 Crews 1-4 challenge similarity networks for pre, during, and post 163 communication delay Figure 6 Crews 1-4 goal similarity networks for pre, during, and post communication 164 delay Figure 7 An example diagram of the discontinuous growth model terms 165 Figure 8 Crews 1-9 shared task mental model similarity over time 166 Figure 9 Crews 1-9 shared team mental model similarity over time 167 Figure 10 Crews 1-9 combined shared vision over time 168 Figure 11 Crews 1-9 shared goals over time 169 Figure 12 Crews 1-9 shared challenges over time 170 Figure 13 A summary diagram of the discontinuous growth model parameters for task 171 mental model similarity Figure 14 A summary diagram of the discontinuous growth model parameters for team 172 mental model similarity Figure 15 A summary diagram of the discontinuous growth model parameters for shared 173 goals 6 Executive Summary Teams spending months, even years in space journeying past Earth’s orbit and possibly reaching Mars in the next 15-20 years will stretch the boundaries of teamwork and expose challenges previously uninvestigated in teams literature. I investigated the phenomenon of team cognition in the context of environments where individuals cohabitated for long periods of time working on an extended performance episode. Specifically, I explored the content of team cognition, the trends in team cognition over time, as well as the consequences of team cognition in these environments focusing on the unique conditions of cohabitation and longevity.

I not only examined the dynamics of a team construct under unique conditions, but also shed light on team cognition in general by broadening the investigation into the different forms of team cognition that vary along dimensions relevant to the conditions of cohabitation and longevity. I demonstrated how these constructs unfold over time, how contextual factors differentially impacted the patterns of team cognitions and investigated the consequences of different types of team cognition. The conditions of cohabitation, and longevity are found in environments covering a range of contexts including Antarctic research stations, Arctic expeditions, submarines, space travel, and space analogues. The environment I focused my research on was the space analogue.

These environments mimic the conditions of living and traveling in space for long periods of time over great distances analogous to a long mission such as a journey to Mars. In these analogues, teams of people were confined for multiple weeks in a small habitat, isolated from the outside world. These people had to interact with the same team members every day, they had minimal personal space, limited contact with friends and family, restricted communication, sleep deprivation, periods of high workload, and long periods of boredom. 7 In Chapter 1, I unpack how these contextual factors could impact individual and team adaptation and functioning.

The main focus of the chapter was to develop a taxonomy of team cognition constructs. The taxonomy classifies team cognition along six different dimensions. The first three: 1) content of cognition (task versus team related), 2) nature of emergence (compositional versus compilational), and 3) form of cognition (structured, perceptual, or interpretive) are commonly referenced dimensions in the team cognition literature. However, the context and requirements of teamwork in teams traveling through space extend the concept of what it means to work on a team.

Therefore, the next three dimensions I included: 4) work-life relevance (work relevance versus living relevance), 5) dynamism (static, gradual, volatile), and 6) consequence horizon (short-term, mid-term, or long-term) are new dimensions that I used to organize these team cognition constructs given the unique context of cohabitation and longevity that space exploration crews experience. This taxonomy served as the organizational framework for my investigation into different types of team cognition. The first chapter has an overview of team cognition research and then discusses each type of cognition, why it is important, and how it fits into the taxonomy. The key point of Chapter 1 is a proposition: three contextual aspects of space teams - cohabitation, dynamism, and consequence horizon - are core aspects of how members think together over time, and incorporating them into measures and studies of team cognition may improve the prediction of team performance.

Chapter 2 explains the development and testing of a new contextualized measure of team cognition, namely the shared vision of goals and challenges a team faces on a daily basis. This was a qualitative measure that identified the content of individuals’ cognitive representations of the environment on a broader, long term basis. In this chapter, I discuss the themes that emerged, and how those themes varied over time or were impacted by contextual factors as well as a look 8 at how shared vision (similarity of team member visions) looked in teams and descriptively changed across time. What I found was that the themes that emerged fell into both work and non- work categories, and could then be further divided into various task, logistics, social, and general living sub-categories.

Mission task goals were dominant throughout most of the mission, but tended to decline in prominence towards the end when crews became more focused on their well-being. While taskwork was a major motivating focus for the crew vision, the challenges anticipated by the crew were more balanced across living related and work related issues. Finally, I was able to examine the similarity in vision across crew members and identify interesting patterns such as a crew member becoming less and less in sync with the crew over time. The key conclusion from Chapter 2 is that team members think about how work (tasks and logistics) and non-work (social and general living) factors affect the team, and the relative salience of each set of factors changes over time as the mission unfolds.

In Chapter 3, I look at team cognition constructs that were continuously monitored over the course of the space analogue missions. In this study, I explored how these different constructs varied in their trends over time, addressing the need to view team emergent states in extreme environments as dynamic, multifaceted constructs that evolve over time (Salas et al. The two main questions answered in this chapter were 1) what were the trends over time in these constructs? and 2) how did the patterns in these constructs respond to stressors over the course of a long mission? I found that the trends in cognitive similarity varied widely across teams. I broke these patterns down using the communication delay schedule during the mission.

I found that early on in the mission, task and team mental model similarity increased leading up to the communication delay period, and then remained relatively stable for the remainder of the mission. Shared vision, on the other hand, spiked at the onset of communication delay, and the 9 growth trend accelerated in the final phase of the mission. Finally, I found that hindrance network density was associated with less similarity on task mental models, but greater similarity on shared goals. The key finding from Chapter 3 is that teams increase in their team cognitive similarity early on with regards to task related issues, but the trend is less clear when considering life-related mental maps.

Additionally, trends vary widely across teams, which provides new opportunities to investigate what makes teams different in their patterns for developing cognitive similarity.