Industrial and Organizational Psychology Commons^™

Effects Of Practice With Imposed Communication Delay On The Coordination And Effectiveness Of Distributed Teams, Megan L. Dove-Steinkamp

Master's Theses

The current study tested whether introduction of audio transmission delays during skill acquisition would benefit the performance effectiveness of distributed teams in a novel transfer context. Two-person university student teams (N=40) performed a simulated firefighting task in 4 practice trials and a novel transfer condition. Intra-team communications were systematically perturbed with closed-loop transmission delays ranging from 2 to 6 seconds. On average, teams were able to improve performance over time despite transmission delay, with significant differences in performance observed between certain groups both over the course and at the end of the experiment: Short (2s blocked) practice delay was associated …