Recently, attention has been focused on determining the factors that contribute to effective team performance in organizations. In particular, researchers have been interested in deยฎning how shared cognition among team members affects team performance (Cannon-Bowers et al., 1993;Klimoski and Mohammed, 1994). The notion of shared cognition ยฑ which has been variously described as team mental models, shared mental models, shared knowledge, or team cognition ยฑ encompasses the notion that effective team members hold knowledge that is either compatible, complementary, and/or overlapping with teammates. Furthermore, this shared knowledge enables team members to have more accurate expectations and a compatible approach for task performance. Hence, shared knowledge is expected to improve team, and in turn organizational, effectiveness.
Despite several years of research into the shared cognition construct, there are still many questions to be answered regarding exactly what shared cognition is, what knowledge needs to be shared among members, and how various types of shared knowledge affect organizational performance. In particular, it is yet to be determined how best to measure shared cognition, and determine empirically its impact on performance. This Special Issue focuses on recent thinking and research aimed at understanding shared mental models in work teams.
This issue is comprised of eight papers. First Mohammed and Dumville synthesized various literatures and developed a framework that outlines the relationships between team knowledge constructs. The authors adopted a cross-disciplinary focus and incorporated related team knowledge domains from other literatures to accomplish this. Then, research by Rentsch and Klimoski concentrates on deยฎning and testing antecedents of team member schema agreement as well as their indirect effects on the effectiveness of teams. Their results indicate that demography, team size and experience, and team member recruitment are all related to team member schema agreement, which was found to be related to team effectiveness. After that, Gibson discusses a framework for collective cognition in work groups developed to provide guidance in understanding and improving cognitive processes. Then, Levesque, Wilson, and Wholey, discuss cognitive divergence and development of shared mental models in software development project teams. Their research suggests that shared mental models and interaction decline as role differentiation of team members increase. Next, Ensley and Pearce develop a theoretical framework linking shared strategic cognition to both group process and new venture performance. Their results suggest that group processes leading to the development of shared strategic cognition are more important that its outcomes in terms of predicting the performance of the organization. Cannon and Edmondson follow with a focus on shared cognition research by examining shared