The effects of team size on team coordination

The authors investigate the evolution of team coordination as teams expand in a dynamic, distributed, decision-making environment. The foundation of the Team Size Experiment (TEASE) is a distributed computer testbed where subjects performed simulations first as individuals, and later as part of a dyad and yet again as a triad. Time pressure was manipulated as an independent variable on all teams, and as a second variable the content of the decision makers information display was varied for dyads and triads only. Preliminary experimental results focus on the adaptation of different size teams to time stress. The average performance over all experiment conditions of triads was superior to the performance of individuals who did slightly better than dyads. The triad success is attributed in part to a clear division of responsibility, while the dyad had greater coordination uncertainty due to a shared resource responsibility. The performance improvement of triads over dyads suggests that duties performed on cooperative tasks must be clearly defined among team members to assure successful team coordination