Research Methods for Studying Groups and Teams

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STUDYING TEAM COGNITION

The Good, the Bad, and the Practical

Susan Mohammed and Katherine Hamilton

THE PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY

As a newly minted assistant professor, I (first author) embarked on an ambitious study that had all of the hallmarks of academic fame and success (or so I thought!). The goal of the project was to examine the impact of two types of team training (task and team building) on two types of team mental models (teamwork and taskwork) and two types of team performance (task and contextual) over two time periods (mid-semester and the end of the semester). The attempt to directly measure the nascent notion of a team mental model (organized mental representations of relevant team knowledge that are shared across team members) ...