Team Situational Awareness Paper

When moving from individual SA to team SA, it is first important to understand the basic concept of what is a team. According to Salas, Dickinson, Converse, and Tannenbaum (1992), a team is comprised of two or more people who work towards a common goal by assigning specific roles for each of the team members. From this perspective, team members must share information and knowledge and to make decisions together and perform adequately. these cognitive constructs, together with team SA crate the concept of Team Cognition and are crucial for the performance of the team (Cooke, Salas, Cannon-Bowers, & Stout, 2000).
One key element in teamwork is communication because it enables the team members to share information regarding the task at hand and

In this paper the focus will be on two definitions. The first is Team Situational awareness (TSA) which is defined by Endsley as "the degree to which every team member possesses the SA required for his or her responsibilities" (Endsley, 1995, p.39). Thus, each team member's sub goal crates an overall team goal (Endsley, 1995). The second definition is Shared SA, which is "the degree to which team members possess the same SA on shared SA requirements" (Endsley & Jones, 2001, p.48). these two definitions suggest that team SA is comprised of both the individual SA of every team member and the overlap in SA between them. Similar to SA, TSA has also been identified as relevant in team performance (Salas, Prince, Baker & Shrestha, 1995) and many studies has examined the relationship between the two. For example, Parush et. al. (2011) found that information sharing through communication is a key element in achieving TSA in the operating room and that TSA is important for the performance of the operating team. In addition, Cooke and Kiekel (2001) and Cooke et. al. (2004), have conducted experiments in which teams had to operate unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in a simulator and capture aerial photographs, and found in both studies that TSA predicted team performance. However, not all findings converge to the same conclusion, a study by Parush and Ma (2012) investigated the effect of team displays on team performance and TSA in a forest fire simulation, and while it found that the team display improved both performance and TSA (especially with the presence of communication breakdowns), no relation between performance and TSA was observed. Lastly, Rustandjaja (2013) found team performance in a fire fighting simulator to be effected by spatial complexity and TSA to be effected by availability of information, but also did not observe a relation between the two