Coordinated teamwork is essential in fast-paced decision-making environments that require dynamic adaptation, often without an opportunity for explicit communication. Although implicit coordination has been extensively considered conceptually in the existing literature, the majority of work has focused on co-located, synchronous teamwork (such as in sports teams) or, in distributed teams the focus has been primarily on coordination of knowledge work. However, many teams (firefighters, military, law enforcement, emergency response) need to coordinate their movements in physical space without the benefit of visual cues or extensive explicit communication. This paper investigates how three dimensions of spatial coordination, namely exploration diversity, movement specialization, and adaptive spatial proximity, influence team performance in a collaborative online search and rescue task where explicit communication is restricted, and team members must rely on movement patterns to infer others’ intentions and coordinate their actions. Our metrics capture the relational aspects of teamwork by measuring spatial proximity, distribution patterns, and alignment of movements within shared environments. We analyze data from an experiment including 34 four-person teams (136 participants) assigned to specialized roles in a search and rescue task. Our results demonstrate that spatial specialization positively predicts team performance, while adaptive spatial proximity exhibits a marginal inverted U-shaped relationship, suggesting that moderate levels of adaptation are optimal. Furthermore, the temporal dynamics of these spatial coordination metrics clearly differentiate high- from low-performing teams over time. These findings provide insights into implicit spatial coordination in role-based teamwork and highlight the importance of balanced adaptive strategies, with implications for team training and the development of AI-assisted team support systems.
更多
原文链接
分享
引用
