Performance and shared understanding in mixed C2-systems
Publish date: 2011-03-14
Report number: FOI-R--3155--SE
Pages: 98
Written in: English
Keywords:
- Shared understanding
- team performance
- microworld
- situation awareness
- workload
Abstract
The study reported here had two purposes. The main one was to examine how mixed conditions affect a Command & Control (C2) system, particularly in terms of shared understanding, situation awareness (SA), performance and workload. Mixed conditions refer to when subsystems of a larger C2-system differ in terms of capabilities, particularly those capabilities influencing the understanding of a situation e.g. sensors or communication, which could affect the C2-capabilities when working toward a common goal. The second purpose of this study was to investigate a newly developed tool for measuring shared understanding, Shared Priorities, in terms of validity and usefulness. The statistical analysis performed on the collected data showed that the performance and SA was comparatively better when both participants used the computer interface than the mixed condition, which in turn was better than when both participants used a paper map. For workload and teamwork, no differences between the mixed condition and the dual map condition were found. As for the Shared Priorities measurement, no differences were found between any of the conditions. A Structural Equation Model (SEM) shows that the theoretical constructs of SA, workload, teamwork and performance are related and affect each other, so that the workload of the system negatively affects the teamwork and SA, while the teamwork may affect SA positively and a high SA enables high performance.