Browsing by Subject "Teamwork"
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Item A practical method for proactive information exchange within multi-agent teams(Texas A&M University, 2004-11-15) Rozich, Ryan TimothyPsychological studies have shown that information exchange is a key component of effective teamwork. In addition to requesting information that they need for their tasks, members of effective teams often proactively forward information that they believe other teammates require to complete their tasks. We refer to this type of communication as proactive information exchange and the formalization and implementation of this is the subject of this thesis. The important question that we are trying to answer is: under normative conditions, what types of information needs can agent teammates extract from shared plans and how can they use these information needs to proactively forward information to teammates? In the following, we make two key claims about proactive information exchange: first, agents need to be aware of the information needs of their teammates and that these information needs can be inferred from shared plans; second, agents need to be able to model the beliefs of others in order to deliver this information efficiently. To demonstrate this, we have developed an algorithm named PIEX, which, for each agent on a team, reasonably approximates the information-needs of other team members, based on analysis of a shared team plan. This algorithm transforms a team plan into an individual plan by inserting coomunicative tasks in agents' individual plans to deliver information to those agents who need it. We will incorporate a previously developed architecture for multi-agent belief reasoning. In addition to this algorithm for proactive information exchange, we have developed a formal framework to both describe scenarios in which proactive information exchange takes place and to evaluate the quality of the communication events that agents running the PIEX algorithm generate. The contributions of this work are a formal and implemented algorithm for information exchange for maintaining a shared mental model and a framework for evaluating domains in which this type of information exchange is useful.Item Changing group dynamics through computerized language feedback(2012-08) Tausczik, Yla Rebecca; Pennebaker, James W.; Cormack, Lawrence K.; Gosling, Samuel D.; Graesser, Arthur C.; Henderson, Marlone D.Why do some groups of people work well together while others do not? It is commonly accepted that effective groups communicate well. Yet one of the biggest roadblocks facing the study of group communication is that it is extremely difficult to capture real-world group interactions and analyze the words people use in a timely manner. This project overcame this limitation in two ways. First, a broader and more systematic study of group processes was conducted by using a computerized text analysis program (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) that automatically codes natural language using pre-established rules. Groups that work well together typically exchange more knowledge and establish good social relationships, which is reflected in the way that they use words. The group dynamics of over 500 student discussion groups interacting via group chat were assessed by studying their language use. Second, a language feedback system was built to experimentally test the importance of certain group processes on group satisfaction and performance. It is now possible to provide language feedback by processing natural language dialogue using computerized text analysis in real time. The language feedback system can change the way the group works by providing individualized recommendations. In this way it is possible to manipulate group processes naturalistically. Together these studies provided evidence that important group processes can be detected even using simplistic natural language processing, and preliminary evidence that providing real-time feedback based on the words students use in a group discussion can improve learning by changing how the group works together.Item COLLABORATIVE DESIGN PEDAGOGY: A NATURALISTIC INQUIRY OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION(2010-07-14) McPeek, Keith T.This research examines interviews conducted with more than a dozen authorities in architectural education on collaborative methodologies utilized in the design studio and identifies factors that inhibit and facilitate the incorporation of collaborative methods in the context of situated learning. This research explores the notion that the design and implementation of even the simplest architectural projects are almost exclusively collaborative endeavors requiring the expertise of a spectrum of individuals working together to achieve a singular goal. Each of these experts is highly trained in their respective areas, yet few are formally trained authorities in the skills of collaboration, including architects, individuals who are often put at the lead of design projects which include people of varied backgrounds, working styles and areas of expertise. Historically, the education of an architect has been a highly individualized pursuit, focused on the development of an individual skill set seldom requiring collaboration beyond that of student and professor. While this individualized, hands on approach to education has been highly revered by many, it often falls short of its potential and fails to recognize that the greatest design accomplishments of humankind have been the undertaking of collaborative enterprise. Furthermore, architecture students are being prepared in a manner that is contrary to the highly collaborative nature of the architectural practice they will enter without taking away from the inherent strengths of the traditional architectural education. Despite NAAB requirements for collaborative methods in the classroom, and an increasingly collaborative model of professional practice for architects, design education continues to trail woefully behind other disciplines such as business, law, nursing and medicine; each having long ago integrated collaborative study models into their curriculum. This research examines how collaborative methods including intradisciplinary, interdisciplinary and community based collaborations, can be further integrated as a formal part of the overall design curriculum and what factors facilitate and inhibit this inclusion.Item Crew resource management training's effect on railroad crews' perceptions of task interdependence and teamwork(Texas A&M University, 2008-10-10) Kyte, Tobin BruceThe accuracy and similarity of team members' perceptions regarding the interdependencies of their task as well as the criticality of teamwork behaviors is essential to team performance. Unfortunately, these perceptions are not always accurate or similar, which has led to calls for research evaluating the effectiveness of interventions aimed at improving these perceptions. The present study evaluated the accuracy and similarity of crew members' perceptions of task interdependence and teamwork in the U.S. railroad industry. Specifically, this study assessed (1) the effect of Crew Resource Management (CRM) training on the accuracy and similarity of locomotive and maintenance of way (MOW) crew members' perceptions and (2), the extent to which the accuracy and similarity of those perceptions are retained 2-years after training. The overall results of the present study suggests that CRM training is effective in increasing the accuracy and similarity of crew members' perceptions of team-relatedness (amount of task interdependence) and perceptions regarding the importance of teamwork. However, the effectiveness is often dependent on the metric used (i.e., accuracy vs. similarity), and the specific characteristics of the crew members (i.e., locomotive vs. MOW, higher vs. lower interpositional experience). Furthermore, the results suggest that training did not increase the accuracy or similarity of crew members' perceptions of team workflow pattern (form of task interdependence). Lastly, a small sample size and low power precluded the running of quantitative statistical analysis assessing the long-term retention of the accuracy and similarity of participants' perceptions of task interdependence or teamwork. However, for the sake of completeness, the means, standard deviations, and effect sizes are presented in the Appendix.Item Motivating employees for long term company success(2010-12) Rutkowski, Kevin John; Lewis, Kyle, 1961-; Duvic, Robert C.There have been many recent examples in the news of how employees were motivated by their companies to take actions that were not best for the long term success of the company. Mortgage companies gave financial incentives to brokers for each loan approved regardless of quality, which resulted in a large number of defaults several years later. BP, the oil company, gave financial incentives to employees based on short-term profits, which motivated management to perform cheaper and less frequent maintenance on the Alaskan Pipeline. This led to increased bonuses until a pipeline failure several years later. And numerous financial institutions gave employees big performance bonuses based on short-term profits one year before their institutions failed. Many analysts have stated that lucrative bonuses that did not take into account long-term company performance motivated many employees to take dangerous financial risks. In addition, in my 16 years of software development consulting, I have first-hand experience with seeing how companies' motivation techniques influence people to ignore the long-term success of their company. I have seen incentives for delivering a project on time influence project managers and developers to push low quality software into production in order to meet that deadline. Similarly, I have seen incentives (for meeting budget numbers on a project) influence managers to eliminate planning and quality assurance in order to lower the cost of implementing the project. In each of those cases, the resulting low quality software caused long-term damage to the company that could have been avoided if the project were higher quality but slightly late or over budget. I have also seen that incentives, intended to encourage call center employees to take more calls per hour, ended up motivating employees to hang up on customers without solving their problems. This resulted in low customer satisfaction, which led to a long term reduction in sales. These are only a few of the many examples I have seen in my career of how the wrong motivational techniques can have unintended, negative, long-term results for a company. Regardless of whether the motivational techniques are based on profits, revenues, productivity, stock price, or some other factor, many motivational techniques include financial incentives that are based on monthly, quarterly, or yearly results without regard for longer periods of time. Long term incentives, such as vesting in a 401(k) or increased vacation time, are typically focused solely on retaining employees rather than on long-term company performance. This thesis explores the ways in which companies currently motivate employees. The motivation may be extrinsic, using tools such as financial incentives or it may be intrinsic, using tools such as company culture or hiring practices. This thesis will review both academic research and practical management experience related to employee motivation with a goal of identifying practical recommendations for improving the current, common motivational practices. These improvements should encourage employees to take the best actions for the long-term success of the company.Item The Role of leadership in high performance software development teams(2011-12) Ward, John Mason; Nichols, Steven Parks, 1950-; McCann, Robert Bruce, 1948-The purpose of this research was to investigate the role of leadership in creating high performance software development teams. Of specific interest were the challenges faced by the Project Manager without a software engineering background. These challenges included management of a non-visible process, planning projects with significant uncertainty, and working with teams that don’t trust their leadership. Conclusions were drawn from the author’s experience as a software development manager facing these problems and a broad literature review of experts from the software and knowledge worker management fields. The primary conclusion was that, until the next big breakthrough, gains in software development productivity resulting from technology are limited. The only way for a group to distinguish itself as performing at the highest levels is teamwork enabled by good leadership.Item Role-based and agent-oriented teamwork modeling(Texas A&M University, 2005-11-01) Cao, SenTeamwork has become increasingly important in many disciplines. To support teamwork in dynamic and complex domains, a teamwork programming language and a teamwork architecture are important for specifying the knowledge of teamwork and for interpreting the knowledge of teamwork and then driving agents to interact with the domains. Psychological studies on teamwork have also shown that team members in an effective team often maintain shared mental models so that they can have mutual expectation on each other. However, existing agent/teamwork programming languages cannot explicitly express the mental states underlying teamwork, and existing representation of the shared mental models are inefficient and further become an obstacle to support effective teamwork. To address these issues, we have developed a teamwork programming language called Role-Based MALLET (RoB-MALLET) which has rich expressivity to explicitly specify the mental states underlying teamwork. By using roles and role variables, the knowledge of team processes is specified in terms of conceptual notions, instead of specific agents and agent variables, allowing joint intentions to be formed and this knowledge to be reused by different teams of agents. Further, based on roles and role variables, we have developed mechanisms of task decomposition and task delegation, by which the knowledge of a team process is decomposed into the knowledge of a team process for individuals and then delegate it to agents. We have also developed an efficient representation of shared mental models called Role-Based Shared Mental Model (RoB-SMM) by which agents only maintain individual processes complementary with others?? individual process and a low level of overlapping called team organizations. Based on RoB-SMMs, we have developed tworeasoning mechanisms to improve team performance, including Role-Based Proactive Information Exchange (RoB-PIE) and Role-Based Proactive Helping Behaivors (RoBPHB). Through RoB-PIE, agents can anticipate other agents?? information needs and proactively exchange information with them. Through RoB-PHB, agents can identify other agents?? help needs and proactively initialize actions to help them. Our experiments have shown that RoB-MALLET is flexible in specifying reusable plans, RoB-SMMs is efficient in supporting effective teamwork, and RoB-PHB improves team performance.Item The Tao of coopetition in organizations: culture and categorization of competitive behaviors in teams and working relationships(2009-05) Keller, Josh Wheatly; Huber, George P.; Loewenstein, JeffreyThis dissertation provides a cultural-cognitive perspective on the relationship between cooperation and competition within organizations. Instead of explicitly defining the relationship between cooperation and competition, I examine lay beliefs about the relationship and the impact of these beliefs on perceptions and behavior. This dissertation consists of two studies. In the first study, I examine the role of peoples’ categorization of competitive behaviors as cooperative or non-cooperative in teams. I assess the influence of dialectical reasoning, a culturally-shaped reasoning style, on the categorization of competitive behaviors and the reaction to competitive behaviors within teams. I test my predictions with a laboratory experiment with participants in the US and China. The analyses from this study reveal cultural differences in perceptual and behavioral reactions to competitive behaviors, with differences partially attributed to reasoning style and categorization. In the second study, I examine the role of people’s categorization of competitive behaviors as cooperative or non-cooperative in working relationships. I assess the influence of culture and categorization on people’s ego-centric network of working relationships. I test my predictions with a survey of working professionals in the US and China. The analyses from this study demonstrate that people who categorize certain competitive behaviors as cooperative are more likely to be more cooperative with people they are more competitive with instead of having exclusively cooperative or competitive relationships. The analyses also reveal national cultural differences in people’s networks of working relationships that are partially attributable to categorization of competitive behaviors. By empirically connecting culture and reasoning style to cooperative and competitive behavior in teams and working relationships, this research enhances our understanding of fundamental aspects of organizations, suggesting a new approach to examining the influence of societal factors in behavior within organizations.Item Time out : organizational training for improvisation in lifesaving critial teams(2012-08) Ishak, Andrew Waguih, 1982-; Browning, Larry D.; Ballard, Dawna I.; Stephens, Keri K.; Maxwell, Madeline M.; Ziegler, Jennifer A.Exemplified by fire crews, SWAT teams, and emergency surgical units, critical teams are a subset of action teams whose work is marked by finality, pressure, and potentially fatal outcomes (Ishak & Ballard, 2012). Using communicative and temporal lenses, this study investigates how organizations prime and prepare their embedded critical teams to deal with improvisation. This study explicates how organizations both encourage and discourage improvisation for their embedded critical teams. Throughout the training process, organizations implement a structured yet flexible “roadmap”-type approach to critical team work, an approach that is encapsulated through three training goals. The first goal is to make events routine to members. The second goal is to help members deal with non-routine events. The third goal is to help members understand how to differentiate between what is routine and non-routine. The grounded theory analysis in this study also surfaced three tools that are used within the parameters of the roadmap approach: experience, communicative decision making, and sensemaking. Using Dewey’s (1939, 1958) theory of experience, I introduce a middle-range adapted theory of critical team experience. In this theory, experience and sensemaking are synthesized through communicative decision making to produce decisions, actions, and outcomes in time-limited, specialized, stressful environments. Critical teams have unique temporal patterns that must be considered in any study of their work. Partially based on the nested phase model (Ishak & Ballard, 2012), I also identify three phases of critical team process as critical-interactive, meaning that they are specific to action/critical teams, and they are engaged in by critical teams for the expressed purpose of interaction. These phases are simulation, adaptation, and debriefing. These tools and phases are then placed in the Critical-Action-Response Training Outcomes Grid (CARTOG) to create nine interactions that are useful in implementing a structured yet flexible approach to improvisation in the work of critical teams. Data collection consisted of field observations, semi-structured interviews, and impromptu interviews at work sites. In total, I engaged in 55 hours of field observations at 10 sites. I conducted 31 semi-structured interviews with members of wildland and urban fire crews; emergency medical teams; and tactical teams, including SWAT teams and a bomb squad. I also offer practical implications and future directions for research on the temporal and communicative aspects of critical teams, their parent organizations, and considerations of improvisation in their work.