Understanding Team Context: Team Collaboration and Performance in Military Network-Enabled Operations

During high-tempo military operations, the development of a shared team context is critical to achieving mission success which often requires extraordinary levels of team synchronization with little margin for error. In this case, all members of the team share a common understanding of the evolving situation, what the goals are and how best to achieve them given their prescribed roles/functions and a highly-trained repertoire of tactics, techniques, and procedures. The objective of the current study was to understand team context and how it relates to performance by interpreting collaborative behavior of US military teams based on team dialogue and coordinated movements and engagements. This paper presents preliminary findings regarding what constitutes effective military teaming and was a follow on study to previous research conducted with UK coalition forces.