Team Processes, Training, and Performance: A Special Issue of military Psychology

The military relies on teams for crucial and complex tasks essential to military performance. Therefore, one important contribution of military psychologists is to provide knowledge that helps the military design, compose, and manage teams. In the last few years we have witnessed an explosion in research and development aimed at understanding groups, teams, and collectives. Why the explosion? The complexity of current military technology, combined with catastrophic mishaps attributed to faulty team performance, have focused the attention of the entire military community on the degree to which individuals can be trained to perform as teams. In 1984, Jean Dyer published a seminal review that pointed out the weaknesses of this literature and provided several challenges for the future. This special issue is a way to assess the progress made ten years after Dyer's review and examine issues currently being investigated. The special issue begins with a review of military team research -- describing the considerable body of research that has been amassed through the years and identifying those areas where additional research is required. Next, four empirical efforts are described that serve to illustrate the breadth of research currently being conducted with military teams. These articles: * indicate the role of intrapsychic events in team performance, * demonstrate that team cohesion is a more complex issue than previously thought, * provide direction for future research in this area, * emphasize the role of procedures and planning, * signify the degree to which well-thought-out team processes can be utilized prior to task performance in order to assist members in coping with the demands of the subsequent task, and * discuss attempts to evaluate the behavioral outcomes of aircrew coordination training. The final article provides an example of laboratory research designed to identify specific behaviors associated with effective perfomance. The results of this study indicate that even subtle behavioral differences might account for observable differences in resource allocation performance. This special issue's goal is to motivate military researchers to continue the progress in understanding teams and collectives.