Situation awareness and co-operation within and between hierarchical units in dynamic decision making

This paper is a follow-up of a field study of two military command teams and reports an experiment that tests three organizations (serial, parallel and optional) of co-operation and situation awareness within commander teams, as well as the communication between the commander team and the operative level. It was found that most groups in the optional condition performed worse than the groups in the other conditions. It was also found that members of teams in the parallel condition differed from members of teams in the serial condition in their situation awareness. The more successful commander team produced more planning in relation to hypothesis, as well as sending fewer messages in total between the units, than the less successful team.