Cue validity, availability, and strategies: Finding experts in networked teams using the Team Map tool

Abstract

Team members in rapidly assembled and often spatially distributed command and control teams have little time to get to know each other. Yet they need access to each other's expertise to work effectively. Current tools such as organizational charts are inadequate because they do not provide sufficient cues to indicate who has what expertise. The Team Map tool is a “souped-up” organizational chart in the form of a table that can reveal information such as previous jobs, training or other attributes in an easy-to-use way. As the first step in its design, we investigate how much information can usefully be shown in the Team Map user interface, given several possible team organization types. Using a theoretical framework of cues and cue foraging strategies, we find that a Team Map with just one additional “summary” cue leads to robust expert-finding performance across organization types, regardless of validity of already available cues. Computer simulations of the foraging task showed participants used less of the information available in the user interface the more cues are provided, and that participants had relatively simple cue-use strategies.