Evaluating communication effectiveness in team collaboration

Effective team communication is essential for mission success in many complex operational environments. Whereas most previous research has focused primarily on the psychological factors that can cause breakdowns in team communication, this paper introduces a novel procedure designed to systematically evaluate the impact that a degraded communication transmission channel can have on team performance. This procedure measured communication effectiveness in terms of the time necessary for the team to reach a consensus about the proper ordering of unfamiliar images that were viewed in randomized order. Preliminary results indicate that this procedure can identify differences in communication channel quality that would not be detected by traditional evaluation procedures based solely on point-to-point intelligibility.