Enhanced Mutual Performance Monitoring to Improve Backup Behaviors and Team Performance

Organizations today are becoming increasingly dependent on teams, as often tasks that need to be completed are too complex for an individual alone. There are a multitude of factors that contribute to how effective a team is; however, an important process that needs to be studied more thoroughly is mutual monitoring and consequential backup behaviors. In the past backup behaviors have been studied solely through a task workload manipulation with methods of mutual monitoring rarely being addressed. The present study explores various types of team monitoring through the use of two experimental conditions: monitoring the task performance levels and a control condition in which no meaningful monitoring is available. This in turn, can be related to team performance and backup behaviors. It was hypothesized that teams that are able to monitor each other\u27s task levels will have the higher team performance and a higher number of backup behaviors in the presence of legitimate need compared to the control group. Additionally, these differences were explored for differences over time through performance episodes along with examining their physiological compliance (GSR). This study used a chemical plant simulation where teams of three work together. Participants were recruited through Clemson SONA systems for class credit. Findings from this study indicate that the hypotheses were not supported; however there are some interesting conclusions that can be made from this. There are potential implications for face to face vs virtual teams, monitoring assistance perception\u27s relationship with team emergent states, defining legitimacy of need, and physiological compliance\u27s potential relationship with intra-team differences