A Team Communication Evaluation Method for Assessing the Smoothness of Task Flow

Abstract

Effective communication is essential for positive teamwork across team tasks, and thus team communication analysis methods have received much attention; however, because of the great variety of team tasks, it is often impossible to apply analysis methods and findings about the relationships between team performance and communication in one team task to those of another task. It might therefore be necessary to develop analysis and assessment methods of team communication independent of team task characteristics. Our previous study developed an evaluation index of team communication named “Smoothness of Task Flow (STF),” which was expected to represent how well a lower task step smoothly shifts to the next higher one across different tasks; however, the index has certain problems and has been never applied to another task. The present study improves the evaluation index and validates the improved index by conducting team experiments in which the task requires more complicated communication than did the previous task. The results suggest that the improved index provides more accurate assessment of the smoothness of team communication than did the previous index. The characteristics of the improved index are also discussed using case studies.

Keywords: Teamwork, Team Communication Assessment, Task Flow

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe100403