Understanding Interactive Team Cognition in Crisis Management

Abstract

When a disaster occurs, crisis management teams (CMTs) are charged to process relevant information and create feasible plans as rapidly as possible. In this dissertation, I used interaction as a lens to investigate how multiple CMTs in incident action planning collectively function together as an integrated cognitive system.

Through an integrative analysis of relevant definitions, I revealed the need to explore interactive team cognition (ITC)’s scalability to multiple CMTs and addressed it by synthesizing two conceptualizing dimensions to investigate ITC in a system of multiple CMTs (see Chapter 2). The first dimension (i.e., cognitive system components) defines cognition in a system of CMTs as interaction distributed within and across the system elements. The second dimension (i.e., cognitive system capabilities) defines cognition in a system of CMTs as interaction supporting the overall system’s ability to perceive, diagnose, and adapt to information. Using those literature-driven dimensions as building blocks, I proposed a P-D-A (Perceive-Diagnose-Adapt) framework to investigate ITC in incident action planning (see Chapter 3). Subject matter experts validated its practical and face validity, expecting that a plans section’s info/intel, situation, and section chief units would indeed serve functionally unique roles for the overall system’s perceiving, diagnosing, and adapting capabilities.

Then, two different types of actual interaction data were collected through naturalistic observations at the Emergency Operations Training Center in College Station, TX to examine the framework’s two dimensions. While the first dimension was examined through the network analysis of interactions coded in real-time, the second dimension was examined through the qualitative content analysis of interactions coded in retrospect (see Chapters 4 and 5, respectively). Findings suggested that a plans section’s info/intel, situation, and section chief units did indeed serve behaviorally unique roles for the overall system’s perceiving, diagnosing, and adapting capabilities.

Overall, the proposed and validated P-D-A framework is expected to serve as a descriptive modeling tool to investigate ITC in a system of multiple CMTs during incident action planning. Also, the functional and behavioral roles’ misalignment suggests a paradigm change in designing and training CMTs: from individual-level functional role compliance to system-level behavioral role adaptation.