How teams perform under emergent and dynamic situations: the roles of mental models and backup behaviors

There's No "I" in "Team": Recommendations for Effective Teamwork and Communication in IONM

Effective teamwork is essential in almost every job, and can even mean life, death, or disability in some jobs. Intraoperative neurophysiological monitoring (IONM) is a career in which effective teamwork and accurate communication are of utmost importance, yet it comes with a unique set of challenges in which to achieve those goals. Operating rooms can be very stressful environments, even if a surgical neurophysiologist (SNP) works in the same hospital every day. Often an SNP is required to travel from hospital to hospital and work with different teams each day. In addition, communication with the IONM oversight professional (IONM-P) can be challenging by nature of the telemedicine model which is becoming the most commonly applied IONM model in the United States. It is unfortunate that such critical skills are assumed and are rarely formally trained. In this article, we present evidence-based recommendations for establishing effective team function. We also provide several tools designed to help create effective and efficient teams. Teams cannot function at their best without outstanding communication, so improving teamwork also means improving communication. This article also provides several techniques for excellent communication, regardless of the situation or context.

Shared mental models and task decomposition

Purpose

The research on shared mental models (SMMs) focuses on the importance of all team members holding similar mental models to realize team performance. However, for a perceived decomposable task, it is not required for all team members to have similar mental models to achieve team performance. Moreover, unnecessary overlapping mental models among team members may engender information overloading, translating into suboptimal team performance. Absent from the current literature is an understanding of the factors that determine the minimal overlapping mental models required across specific members for team performance. The purpose of this study is to yield an understanding of these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

This study highlights that the requirement to hold similar mental models across specific team members depends on the task decomposition mechanisms used: task complexity and decomposability, subtask assigned and layer, task modularity, workflow interdependence type and tool attributes.

Findings

Unlike much prior research which measured the relationship between SMMs and team performance at the team level, our conceptualization suggests that the measurement of SMMs and team performance needs to be conducted across a team and subsets of the team or individuals depending on task complexity and decomposability. This current research offers an important viewpoint regarding when team members need to hold similar mental models to realize task performance.

Originality/value

By suggesting new insights into when mental models should be similar across specific team members, this research also provides understanding of why some empirical SMMs studies do not yield positive relationships between similar SMMs and team effectiveness while others do.