Document Type

Poster

Publication Date

4-17-2024

Abstract

While the term is unknown to most people, Transactive Memory Systems (TMS) are a mechanism through which teams of experts (e.g., surgical teams, military teams, etc.) are able to combine their unique areas of expertise to accomplish their shared goals. To develop a TMS, team members must first learn who on the team has what expertise (Peltokorpi, 2008), and together develop a “shared knowledge directory”(SKD). Meanwhile, modern technology has changed the ways that team members can work together and communicate with each other. This research examined how the process of SKD development is impacted by team members’ability to “overhear” each other’s conversations when they purposefully seek information from another team member (e.g., teams working in a shared space versus remote teams). We used agent-based computational modeling with the program R Studio to simulate 240 teams communicating under eight specific conditions. Each team was allowed to engage in 100 communication instances and the differences between the resulting SKDs were analyzed using Aligned Rank Transformation Analysis of Variance. Contradictory to our expectations, when agents on the same team had some overlap in their knowledge (making it more challenging to figure out who is an expert at what), the ability to “overhear” each other even when the information shared was inaccurate still resulted in better SKD development compared to not being able to “overhear” each other’s conversations at all. This study reveals an unexpected possible downside of team members getting to know each other through one-on-one interactions rather than full-group interactions.

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Presented during West Chester University's Research & Creative Activity Day, 17 April 2024

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