STUDYING TEAM COGNITION: The Good, the Bad, and the Practical

As a newly minted assistant professor, I (first author) embarked on an ambitious study that had all of the hallmarks of academic fame and success (or so I thought!). The goal of the project was to examine the impact of two types of team training (task and team building) on two types of team mental models (teamwork and taskwork) and two types of team performance (task and contextual) over two time periods (mid-semester and the end of the semester). The attempt to directly measure the nascent notion of a team mental model (organized mental representations of relevant team knowledge that are shared across team members) longitudinally and position the construct in a nomological network of antecedents and consequences was cutting-edge research for this literature over a decade ago. In addition, we had the perfect context in which to test our model: student restaurant management teams that were required to plan and supervise the preparation of meals patronized by the public daily.