Individuals Perform Better in Teams but Are Not More Aware - Performance and Situational Awareness in Teams and Individuals

Abstract

The relation between situational awareness and performance is inconclusive. Although effective performance has been typically associated with higher situational awareness, some studies did not find this trend. This study examined some of the factors that could influence that relationship. Using a firefighting simulator, we asked participants to run through four urban firefighting scenarios, two as individual players and the other two as two-person teams. The findings show better performance in teams as compared to individuals. In contrast, individuals had higher levels of SA when they played alone compared to playing in a team. In other words, even though the team performed better, it was not associated with team members having better situational awareness in the team scenarios. It is possible that team processes, such as communication and coordination, were not effective in the team play in the experiment, resulting in poorer SA, yet not disruptive enough to the performance. This was probably because they could have reached high performance without effective teamwork. There may also be some tacit situational knowledge not measured by SAGAT, that mediates situational awareness and performance.