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Investigating Team Adaptation through Warfighter Communications

DescriptionAdaptation is essential for maintaining team effectiveness in dynamic environments (Burke et al., 2006; Gorman and Wiltshire, 2024). While past research has primarily focused on individual-level constructs, like shared mental models or aggregated perceptions, these approaches often overlook how adaptation emerges at the team level through collective interaction (Gorman et al., 2010). Recent frameworks grounded in Interactive Team Cognition emphasize dynamic coordination, treating teams as self-organizing systems that evolve over time (Cooke et al., 2013). Accordingly, communication functions as a medium for coordination and a behavioral manifestation of adaptive reorganization. Analyzing how communication structures shift over time offers insight into processes that impact performance (Gorman et al., 2017). In this study, we applied Collective Systems Adaptation (CSA) analysis, a multivariate time-series method, to quantify communication adaptation events. CSA captures adaptation events by detecting temporally aligned shifts across five measures of communication dynamics. Using data from 28 simulated combat missions, we examined how adaptations related to mission performance. Results indicate that larger, less frequent adaptations were positively associated with accuracy, while greater cumulative adaptation predicted lower overall performance. This supports a systems-oriented account of team adaptation, suggesting that CSA offers a promising approach for capturing real-time reorganization in team communication structures.

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