An evaluation method of team communication based on a task flow analysis

Effective communication is essential for positive teamwork irrespective of task types, and thus, team communication analysis methods have received much attention. Many methods for analyzing the relationships between team performance and team communication have been proposed; however, they have often only dealt with correlations between performance and communication in some specific contexts and have not directly identified problem parts of team task processes that require shared cognition in team. It is necessary therefore to develop such a method for evaluating team communication that is both task-independent and able to analyze problem parts of team task processes. This study aims to propose an evaluation method of team communication based on a task flow analysis and to verify the method by team experiments. The results implied that the new evaluation index named SCF can be applied to other team tasks and can identify problem parts of team task processes in terms of task steps. The characteristics of the index are also discussed using case studies.