Abstract: Abstract
Shared mental models (SMMs) were defined as team members’ shared understandings about team task, task context and strategies, team interaction patterns, and teammates’ traits. Team task models and team interaction models were distinguished as two types of SMMs. It has been showed that SMMs can enhance the efficiency of team processes and team performance. Although researchers have focused on antecedents and consequences of SMMs, little research has been conducted to examine the development of SMMs. The current study aimed to investigate how two types of SMMs developed from low to high level.
Totally 132 student participants formed 44 3-person teams to perform on a simulation task, which was developed particularly for the current study. Among them, 23 teams were provided with team performance feedback during task execution, the other 21 teams were under no-feedback condition. Participants were randomly assigned to feedback conditions and to positions within teams. Mental models (MMs) were elicited using participants’ individual paired ratings of the relatedness among key concepts of team task or interaction behavior before, during and after task execution. Pathfinder, a network-analysis computer program, could represent each member’s MMs based on the matrix of paired ratings, and could offer a closeness index (C index) to reflect the similarity of MMs between each pair of teammates. Three “C” indexes were averaged to form the team similarity score.
Results of mixed-model ANOVA showed that: a) similarity of mental models increased significantly over time; b) similarity of task models was significantly higher than that of interaction models; and c) similarity of task models increased faster under feedback condition than under no-feedback condition, whereas similarity of interaction models increased significantly only under feedback condition. Differences in the development of these two models were discussed in terms of whether the models were task-specific in natureThe results indicate that the development of team task models and team interaction models might have different features, and that team performance feedback might have different effects on the development of these two models

Key words: team, Shared Mental Models, similarity rating, pathfinder, performance feedback