The effects of automation on team performance and team coordination

The advancement of technology has led to an increased use of automation in a number of work domains, including team environments. Assessment of the effects of automation on teamwork has been primarily limited to the aviation domain and studies have produced conflicting information regarding the impact of automation on teamwork.; Researchers have begun to develop taxonomies and models of automation so that specific forms of automation can be defined and evaluated. A model proposed by Parasuraman et al. (2000) considers automation as it is applied to stages of information processing, including information acquisition, information analysis, decision selection, and action implementation. The objective of this research was to evaluate the effects of automation as applied to these stages on the performance and coordination of teams in a complex decision making task.; A simulated Theatre Defense Task in which teams protect a home base from enemy attack was used as a test-bed for this evaluation. Two team members were required to work together to share information in order to successfully complete the task. Four automation conditions were designed that compared different degrees of information acquisition, information analysis, and decision selection automation. Two levels of difficulty were assessed. Dependent measures for the experiment included team effectiveness, quantity of communication, ratings of team coordination, and workload ratings.; The results of the experiment revealed that different forms of automation have different effects on teamwork. Automation of information acquisition caused a decrease in the amount of communication and an increase in the ratio of information transferred to information requested. Automation of information analysis resulted in higher team coordination ratings. Automation of decision selection led to better team effectiveness under low task difficulty at the cost of higher workload. The fact that differing forms of automation had different influences on team performance in this research aids in explaining conflicting historical findings regarding the effects of automation on teamwork. The results of this research may have utility for the design of complex systems used in team environments.