A team training field research study: Extending a theory of team development

Abstract

Recent advances in the science of teams have provided much insight into the important attitudes (e.g., team cohesion and efficacy), cognitions (e.g., shared team cognition), and behaviors (e.g., teamwork communications) of high performing teams and how these competencies emerge as team members interact, and appropriate measurement methods for tracking development. Numerous training interventions have been found to effectively improve these competencies, and more recently have begun addressing the problem of team dynamics. Team science researchers have increasingly called for more field studies to better understand training and team development processes in the wild and to advance the theory of team development. In addition to the difficulty of gaining access to teams that operate in isolated, confined, and extreme environments (ICE), a major practical challenge for trainers of ICE teams whose schedules are already strained is the need to prioritize the most effective strategies to optimize the time available for implementation. To address these challenges, we describe an applied research experiment that developed and evaluated an integrated team training approach to improve Tactical Combat Casualty (TC3) skills in U.S. Army squads. Findings showed that employing effective team training best practices improved learning, team cognition, emergent team processes, and performance. We recommend future research should focus on understanding the types of training strategies needed to enable teams and team leaders to develop from novices to experts. Effectively modifying training to scale it to team expertise requires more research. More laboratory and field research is needed to further develop measures of team knowledge emergence for complex task domains, and include other potential emergent factors such as team leadership and resilience. Practical implications for research include developing automated tools and technologies needed to implement training and collect team data, and employ more sensitive indicators (e.g., behavioral markers) of team attitudes, cognitions and behaviors to model the dynamics of how they naturally change over time. These tools are critical to understanding the dynamics of team development and to implement interventions that more effectively support teams as they develop over time.