Most Valuable Player? : Assessing the impact of individual team role activity on team performance in a microworld environment

Sammanfattning: Studying team performance dynamics in tasks and activities has proven difficult because of the dynamic and unpredictable nature of the real world. Microworld systems aim to address that issue by providing researchers with controllable simulated environments that captures the essence of their real-world counterpart activities. This study utilized one such microworld system, called C3Fire, to simulate a forest firefighting setting where 48 participants divided into 12 teams were tasked with cooperating in extinguishing the fires. Teams consisted of four roles – each with its different responsibilities and resources. The aim of this study was to determine whether any individual team role had a greater impact on team performance than the other roles. Each team encountered three distinct scenarios of varying difficulty. Command input action counts and self-assessed performance scores were collected for each participant. These measurements were tested for correlations with team scores. The logistics chief role, who was responsible for re-filling and re-fueling other units, stood out as being the only role whose command input count correlated with team score, and being one of only two roles for which command inputs and self-assessed performance scores were correlated, as well. Results of a multiple regression procedure also indicated that the command counts of the logistics chief was a significant predictor of team score.