Modeling Team Processes: Issues and a Specific Example

This paper develops a perspective to modeling team processes by drawing on concepts from team theory, and the informational processing and organizational paradigms. In such a perspective, humans and their interactions in a team are modeled as objects in a computerized environment. The behavior of the objects are specified in terms of the executable programs. A simulation testbed is described. Various information structures for team decision making in an example financial domain are examined. Questions regarding the relationship between information structure (who (knows) what, when, and how (the information is used)) and team performance are studied for the example. Thus this study can be seen as a step in the translation of behavioral and normative viewpoints of team decision making into a computational framework. The results indicate that there are complex relationships between information structure and team performance. The conventional wisdom relating improved performance to more information is not always true. The experiments demonstrate several situations of team interaction where more information can lead to dysfunctional effects.