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In a variety of domains, teams represent the main mechanism for dealing with change, complexity, and uncertainty in organizations. Consequently, teams need to be able to adapt and effectively use shared and complementary cognitive processing while collaborating to deal with these challenges.

A conceptual review is provided that addresses this type of complex collaborative cognition via discussion of macrocognition and the processes contributing to effective team problem-solving.

Despite extensive research on problem-solving, research and theories regarding how problem-solving changes over time as teams develop is missing. With this review, we extend research on team problem-solving and team development through integration of existing theory and concepts from the team literature.

This review provides a theoretical foundation for understanding and studying the developmental dynamic of team problem-solving.

A team problem-solving development model is described which outlines the degree to which the primary elements of team development are likely to affect macrocognitive processes within problem-solving phases. A set of propositions is offered in order to guide research on team development in collaborative problem-solving.

Team cognition research continues to evolve as the need for understanding and improving complex problem solving itself grows. Complex problem solving requires members to engage in a number of complicated collaborative processes to generate solutions. This chapter illustrates how the Macrocognition in Teams model, developed to guide research on these processes, can be utilized to propose how intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) could be developed to train collaborative problem solving. Metacognitive prompting, based upon macrocognitive processes, was offered as an intervention to scaffold learning these complex processes. Our objective is to provide a theoretically grounded approach for linking intelligent tutoring research and development with team cognition. In this way, team members are more likely to learn how to identify and integrate relevant knowledge, as well as plan, monitor, and reflect on their problem-solving performance as it evolves. We argue that ITSs that utilize metacognitive prompting that promotes team planning during the preparation stage, team knowledge building during the execution stage, and team reflexivity and team knowledge sharing interventions during the reflection stage can improve collaborative problem solving.

Emergency management groups aiming to address community resilience work with complex systems which consist of multiple interacting dynamics. The purpose of this paper is to help ensure that information is displayed in a way which supports strategic performance, to address longer term challenges faced by these groups.

Ten professional emergency managers completed an online simulation of complex, community resilience related tasks faced in their normal working lives. They responded to either table-or diagram-based information about a relevant emergency management strategy. Responses were rated by academic and practitioner experts using 0-5 point Likert scales.

Analyses of the expert ratings found that certain components of macrocognitive performance reached large degrees of inter-rater reliability (ρ=0.76, p=0.003; ρ=0.58, p=0.03; ρ=0.53, p=0.05). Current situation awareness increased by an average of 29 per cent in the diagram condition. Prospective amendment quality also increased, by an average of 38 per cent. A small sample size meant that these increases are difficult to generalise.

Extensions of this pilot research could use larger samples and more generic simulation conditions, to increase confidence in the claim that certain displays help improve strategic emergency management planning.

It is recommended that further research continues to focus on current and prospective situational awareness, as measures of strategic emergency management performance which can be reliably expert rated.

This research provides novel methodological considerations for supporting a more strategic approach to emergency management, with a focus on longer term implications.

In this chapter we highlight a neurodynamic approach that is showing promise as a quantitative measure of team performance.

During teamwork the rapid electroencephalographic (EEG) oscillations that emerge on the scalp were transformed into symbolic data streams which provided historical details at a second-by-second resolution of how the team perceived the evolving task and how they adjusted their dynamics to compensate for, and anticipate new task challenges. Key to this approach are the different strategies that can be used to reduce the data dimensionality, including compression, abstraction and taking advantage of the natural redundancy in biologic signals.

The framework emerging is that teams continually enter and leave organizational neurodynamic partnerships with each other, so-called metastable states, depending on the evolving task, with higher level dynamics arising from mechanisms that naturally integrate over faster microscopic dynamics.

The development of quantitative measures of the momentary dynamics of teams is anticipated to significantly influence how teams are assembled, trained, and supported. The availability of such measures will enable objective comparisons to be made across teams, training protocols, and training sites. They will lead to better understandings of how expertise is developed and how training can be modified to accelerate the path toward expertise.

The innovation of this study is the potential it raises for developing globally applicable quantitative models of team dynamics that will allow comparisons to be made across teams, tasks, and training protocols.

Team cohesion and other team processes are inherently dynamic mechanisms that contribute to team effectiveness. Unfortunately, extant research has typically treated team cohesion and other processes as static, and failed to capture how these processes change over time and the implications of these changes. In this chapter, we discuss the characteristics of team process dynamics and highlight the importance of temporal considerations when measuring team cohesion. We introduce innovative research methods that can be applied to assess and monitor team cohesion and other process dynamics. Finally, we discuss future directions for the research and practical applications of these new methods to enhance our understanding of the dynamics of team cohesion and other processes.

The rapidly growing body of global leadership literature still lacks research on both global change and global leader cognition. This chapter presents two case studies describing large-scale global change efforts led by expert global leaders. This is complemented with the results of cognitive task analysis interviews with the two expert global leaders. The findings include task diagrams of the change process they employed and knowledge audits of the most difficult cognitive step in the change processes they led. The audit identifies the elements of expert cognition they utilized, the cues and strategies they employed, and the perceived difficulties novices would experience in similar situations. The findings confirm previous research, solidifying the role and nature of expert cognition in global leaders. We conclude with a discussion of the implications our analysis holds for research and practice.

This study attempts to answer the question: “how are the two drivers, accountability focus and organizational learning, independently and interactively associated with public agencies’ proactive policy orientation?” The first driver is the multiple accountabilities that public agencies pursue: (1) bureaucratic, (2) legal, (3) professional and (4) political. The second driver is the organizational learning activities of public agencies: (1) socialization, (2) externalization, (3) combination and (4) internalization.

For data, 800 respondents from the public agencies in South Korea were surveyed.

The analysis provided several findings: (1) the discretionary accountabilities (professional and political) have a greater positive influence on the proactive policy orientation; (2) the conventional accountabilities (legal and bureaucratic) tend to have negative impacts on the proactive policy orientation and (3) among the four types of accountability, legal accountability can be more significantly complemented by organizational learning activities, which can enable both visionary and realistic administration in a balanced manner.

This study provides a unique insight on how organizational proactivity can be ensured through the interactions of organizational accountabilities and organizational learning.