Team Cognition

This chapter focuses on team mental models (TMM) (shared, organized understanding of teamwork and taskwork knowledge) and team situation awareness (TSA, shared knowledge about current and future environmental events) because both capture unique aspects of team cognition, and derive from distinct literatures and methodologies. It provides an integrative review across TMM and situation awareness domains, answering the call for greater synthesis across team cognition constructs. After providing a brief overview of team cognition, TMMs and situation awareness, the chapter presents an integrative framework and identifies future research needs. As a multidimensional construct, team cognition comprises many specific exemplars, and the authors chose to focus on TMM and situation awareness, which emphasize knowledge content. To avoid redundancy with comprehensive reviews of the research on TMMs and situation awareness, the individual coverage of each construct emphasizes current research.