Validating Measures of Team Reorganization and Interdependency in Response to Uncertainty in an Air Battle Management Task

Teams working in complex, high-stakes environments may encounter uncertain situations for which they are not trained and can suffer dangerous consequences if they fail to overcome such uncertainty. We focus on how reorganization and dynamic interdependency across communications and air battle management (ABM) assets in response to uncertainty can be quantified in dynamic task environments. We analyzed data from a 5-day experiment conducted in an ABM task scenario to validate metrics of team reorganization and dynamic interdependency. Interactions quantifying reorganization and interdependency across technological task components significantly predicted team performance and higher interdependency of team communications also predicted better performance. Our findings indicate that reorganization and interdependency, primarily across technological assets, may be valid predictors of team effectiveness. Practical implications of this work primarily relate to assisting teams to achieve adaptive team-level proficiencies to uncertainty-inducing perturbations by providing objective feedback on reorganization and interdependency during team training.