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Title : Toward Optimal Team Processes: How Interventions Can Create Process Gains
Date : November 9, 2009, 3:00-3:50 p.m., 203 Zachry
Speaker : Deanna M. Kennedy, Visiting Assistant Professor
Affiliation : Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Texas A&M University
Abstract
The increasing implementation of teams in organizations has motivated research regarding team processes and performance. This study focuses on how mental model convergence, a cognitive process, unfolds to impact team performance. Based on the interplay between cognitive and communicative processes, team communication patterns evoking the underlying mental model convergence process of baseline, intervention, and optimal teams are examined. The baseline team data, collected in a laboratory setting, inform a simulation model of communication from which intervention team data are generated. The performance of these intervention teams is assessed on a neural network performance model. Teams with optimal communication patterns are discovered using genetic algorithm procedures for combinatorial problems with multiple objectives. Results indicate that by shifting the timing of communication patterns using interventions, the mental model convergence process emulates those of optimal teams and process gains are created.
Bio
Deanna M. Kennedy is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A & M University. She received her Ph.D. in Management Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She holds an M.B.A. from Golden Gate University at San Francisco and a Bachelor's degree in Biological Sciences from the University of California at Davis. In 2007, she received the Isenberg Award from UMASS for academic merit and commitment to the integration of science, engineering, and management.
