Subteams and Shared Workloads Improved Team Learning

You are on a military team that must defend its base against incursions by enemy vehicles without destroying your own vehicles. In the midst of battle four types of unknown airplanes enter your zone of defense. How do you, as a team, learn to recognize which are enemies and, of those, which are the biggest threat and therefore highest priority?

That's the scenario presented to 109 groups of undergraduates in four-person teams fighting a computer-game battle. Researchers manipulated the simulation so that on some teams one person had more work than other members, and on others the workload was more evenly distributed. They also organized the teams three ways, with:

• each member controlling one type of vehicle (tanks, jets, etc.);
• each member controlling four vehicles, one of each type; or
• a subteam arrangement where two members jointly controlled two types of vehicles.

Teams with evenly distributed workloads won more mock battles. Teams with members who were more "agreeable" did not perform better, as you might expect—these people can be less willing to risk team conflict by sharing ideas. Finally, teams broken into equal-power subteams were more effective than those with individual specialists or generalists.

Source: Ellis, A., et al. (03), "Team Learning: Collectively Connecting the Dots," Journal of Applied Psychology 88(5):821.