Measuring team situation awareness through team communication: A study on nuclear main control room crews.

Situation awareness (SA) in complex socio-technical systems is considered a key cognitive activity, as control crews are often engaged in simultaneous task processes and are required to monitor and evaluate system parameters, making decisions and projections for the future accordingly. However, measuring SA at the team level is still a challenging area of research within the topic. In our research, we applied verbal protocol analysis as an alternative method to assess nuclear power plant control room crews' team SA. We conducted a study of 10 control room crews, examining their intrateam communication and its relatedness to team performance. We have found that communication categories related to the second and third levels of team SA increased significantly after the onset of an emergency event. Furthermore, while none of the team communication categories was related to team performance before the emergency event, all of them showed a strong positive correlation with team performance after the emergency situation occurred. Our results underline the importance of adequate verbalization of key information within the team, so as to support the rapid and accurate development of team SA during emergency situations.

The influence of team workload on team performance in the light of task complexity: a study of nuclear fire brigades.

The aim of the study was to explore the effect of perceived team workload on team performance among nuclear fire brigades of the Hungarian nuclear power plant. Our sample consisted of six firefighting teams (N = 42 individuals) who were involved in two high-fidelity simulated scenarios with different task complexity. Team workload was measured by the NASA Task Load Index, while team performance was evaluated by a team of experts. Our results showed that teams generally managed to maintain a standard performance in both cases, although they perceived there to be a higher workload during the complex scenario. Our results further revealed that perceived 'physical demand' and 'effort' factors contributed to the increased level of workload in the complex task. Finally, in the case of the simple simulated scenario, workload and team performance were not related to each other, while the two were positively correlated in the complex scenario.