Name: David Grimm

Dissertation Proposal Meeting

Date: Thursday, May 2, 2024

Time: 1:00 PM 

Location: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/99485788857

Advisor & Co-Chair: 

Jamie Gorman, Ph.D. (Arizona State University)

Dissertation Committee Members:

Co-Chair: Richard Catrambone, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Mengyao Li, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Rick Thomas, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Christopher Wiese, Ph.D. (Georgia Tech)

Title: Measuring Dynamic Team Interdependency and Reorganization in Response to Uncertainty

Abstract: Teams working in complex and dynamic environments often encounter varying degrees of uncertainty. An essential characteristic of teams is that team members must depend on one another while collaborating in a work domain, indicating high interdependency. The consequences of not identifying the causes of uncertainty and overcoming uncertainty by recognizing and implementing changes to address it can be catastrophic. For teams to perform effectively, it is essential that they can work together and overcome uncertainty to solve difficult and unpredictable problems. This research will focus on dynamic reorganization in response to uncertainty and interdependency in teams, how to measure these two constructs, and test the relationship between reorganization, interdependency, and uncertainty. It is hypothesized that teams that reorganize rapidly and act more interdependently can overcome uncertainty more effectively. To characterize types of uncertainty, this dissertation work will include categories from a taxonomy of team uncertainty (Grimm, 2022). This taxonomy will inform the identification and implementation of several different types of uncertainty. Reviewing these different types of uncertainty will provide the basis for distinct sources that introduce uncertainty into teams.

This dissertation will involve two studies. The first study is a pilot study (Study 1) and is an analysis of archival data of teams working in an air battle management scenario. The purpose of Study 1 is to validate the measures for team reorganization in response to uncertainty and dynamic interdependency and to establish their potential to detect dynamic changes in a team task, as they will be used for the proposed experiment in Study 2. It was found that measures of both technological and communicative reorganization and interdependency were correlated with team performance. These findings inform the hypotheses for Study 2, which are described in the context of the proposed experimental procedure.

For the second study, there is a proposed experiment in which teams will operate in a simulated remotely piloted aircraft system context and encounter various types of uncertainty perturbations. The purpose of the proposed experiment is to implement specific perturbations informed by the taxonomy of team uncertainty and examine how different types of uncertainty can result in different patterns of team reorganization and interdependency in response to uncertainty. Study 2 will use these perturbations to validate the hypothesized relationships between team reorganization in response to uncertainty and dynamic interdependency. Moreover, these measures of reorganization and interdependency will be used to predict team effectiveness (outcome and process performance). The implications and applications of this work will be discussed in terms of real-time reorganization and interdependency measurement for complex teaming operations. The findings of this research have implications for teams working in dangerous environments where uncertainty is inevitable and team competencies such as dynamic reorganization and interdependency are vital; such applications may include military, healthcare, and transportation settings.