Effects of metacognition in cooperation on team behaviors

Abstract

Traditional studies on measurements and training of teamwork have often focused on observational teamwork behaviors; however, measurements and training of unobservable teamwork such as mutual performance monitoring are also important for improving teamwork measurement and training. In addition, an improvement of cognitive mechanisms underlying teamwork must effectively be able to enhance team performance because sufficient situation awareness of status of team is expected to be a requirement for positive teamwork behaviors. This study focuses on metacognition in cooperation that underlies team cooperation and aims to investigate the importance of metacognition in cooperation by analyzing contents of reflection on cooperation collected in our previous study in terms of our proposed model about metacognition in cooperation. The comparisons of metacognition in cooperation elicited in a team experiment and team performance indexes suggest that an expansion of range of metacognition in cooperation by metacognitive instructions will enhance team performance and that certain types of metacognition in cooperation are important for positive teamwork.