STC: The Evolutioin Mechanism Of Shared Mental Models In Team Decision Making

Teamwork is an effective solution for complex job completion. Researchers paidmore and more attention to team decision making and team processes. The evolutionmechanism at cognitive level became the key tone of teamwork research.Cannon-Bowers(1993) suggested that a shared mental models (SMMs) theory mayhelp to understand the process of team decision making, which refers to an organizedunderstanding or mental representation of knowledge shared by team member. SMMscan represent the present condition of the system, can explain the dynamicrelationship between system elements and can anticipate the development of thesystem. SMMs enable the team to form accurate explanations and expectations fortask and team processes, which would help to coordinate the decision making of teammembers and adapt the dynamic system of the decision task and teammate'requirement.The positive correlation between similarity index of SMMs and teamperformance had been proven in many researches. But the researchers did notinvestigate the theory in a dynamic system and not prove the relationship between theevolution of the SMMs and the improvement of team performance. The mechanism ofthe SMMs evolution still needs further research. Based on the Theory of SMMs,Multilevel Theory of Team Decision Making and the Dynamic Adaptation of DecisionBehavior, the author proposed the STC mechanism in SMMs evolution in teamdecision making. This theory identifies 3 core mechanisms in team knowledgelearning: distributed sharing, adaptive transformation and interactive construction. Aninvestment stimulate gaming study was presented to test the influence of leadership,time pressure and feedback to the STC mechanism and the improvement of teamperformance.Results from the study proved the existence of STC mechanism in SMMs evolution. The STC index can be more effective than the similarity index, whichrepresents a more specific change in SMMs evolution. Results indicated thatleadership and feedback increased the distributed sharing and adaptive transformation,time pressure weakened the interactive construction. The STC mechanism is amediator variable between leadership, time pressure, feedback and improvement ofteam performance. Distributed sharing and adaptive transformation are completemediator variables between leadership, feedback and improvement of teamperformance, which means leadership and feedback improve team performance bydistributed sharing and adaptive transformation. Interactive construction is a partialmediator variable between time pressure and improvement of team performance,which means time pressure weaken team performance both by interactive constructionand directly.