Psychometric Properties of Team Resilience and Team Complementarity as Human-Autonomy Team Cohesion Factors

Abstract

Adopting autonomous systems into human teams will likely affect the development of critical team states like cohesion. Thus, there is a need to understand how critical states emerge and change within human-autonomy teams and how they can be measured. To address these shortcomings, we developed a novel self-report scale to assess cohesion in human-autonomy teams. We created an initial pool of 134 items from the human team literature, selected to indicate the following dimensions: function-based task cohesion, structural cohesion (Griffith, 1988), interpersonal cohesion (Carron et al., 1985), and two novel subdimensions: perceived team complementarity (Piasentin & Chapman, 2007), and team resilience (Cato et al., 2018). Following assessment by eleven subject matter experts (SMEs), 82 items, were tested for content validity (Neubauer et al., 2021). We then administered items (or the scale) to participants during an online validation study. Although it is believed that all five subdimensions are useful for understanding cohesion in human autonomy teams, further analysis was warranted to evaluate the two new subdimensions. Therefore, the current paper focuses on the psychometric properties of team resilience and team complementarity.The online validation study was conducted at the U.S. Military Academy (USMA) at West Point using Qualtrics survey software. Data were collected from 294 USMA Cadets who ranged in age from 18 to 28 years (M= 19.97, SD= 1.49). We asked participants to imagine they were part of a human agent team that was instructed to work together. They viewed video vignettes illustrating these scenarios. These video clips featured high and low cohesive teams consisting of human and robot team members performing various collaborative tasks. Following the clip, participants rated their perceived level of the team’s cohesion using one or more subdimensions from our newly developed human-autonomy team cohesion scale. Participants also filled out a version of the Group Environment Questionnaire GEQ (Carless and DePaola, 2000).To evaluate our items and their corresponding subfactors, we defined several criteria for inclusion in subsequent research: internal consistency (i.e., whether different items measure the same underlying factor), invariance (i.e., whether items retain their meaning across contexts), sensitivity to depictions of high and low cohesion scenarios, and being both distinct from, and correlated with, the task and social cohesion subfactors from the GEQ-10. In our analyses of team complementarity, we found four items that met our inclusion criteria. In our analyses of team resilience, we first separated items into several subfactors: Team Learning Orientation, Shared Language, Team Functioning, and Perceived Efficacy (Berg et al., 2021; Morgan et al., 2013). Of the subfactors, only the Perceived Efficacy subfactor had good measurement properties. The Shared Language subfactor had good internal consistency and met criteria for partial scalar invariance, so it may contain helpful items in future measures. The results of these analyses highlight Team Complementarity as a salient subdimension for cohesion and suggest consideration for incorporating Perceived Efficacy into future Team Cohesion measurements.