| Summary: | 博士 === 國立政治大學 === 科技管理與智慧財產研究所 === 106 === This dissertation explored the developmental process of team mental model (TMM) in an interdisciplinary project team. TMM has been recognized as one of the most relevant constructs in collective cognitive and team learning. Prior researches acknowledged the contribution of TMM to team performance; teams with better TMM perform better. Limited empirical TMM researches were focused on action teams working on structured tasks like PC-based command and control simulations, cockpits, air traffic control towers, or military missions. Disagreed results emerged in teams dealing with knowledge integration however. This student attributed said discrpancy to some presumptions due to traditonal TMM researches. The objective of this research was to investigate how TMM is developed with those presumptions lifted.
This study used a single case approach. In this interdisciplinary project, artists and engineers alien to each other were recruited to build a mechanical flower in twenty two months. Team members were interviewed to rebuild the process from which following findings were inferred in a team that requires knowledge integration:
1. A project initiator inherent to an interdisciplinary team substantially defines the initializing vector of the TMM.
2. The process by which a proposal becomes part of the TMM can be operationalized as a role transition of that proposal from a theme to a premise in the team. Each TMM ingredient is characterized as a team-specific jargon.
3. Proposals accepted and rejected by the team both constitute the TMM and influence the following development.
4. The TMM is developed as a layered conformal structure. More stable and shared by all members, the core TMM is interfaced by the intermediary TMM to the peripheral TMM. The peripheral TMM is shared only by subgroup members. With such a structure, decisions and actions are locally performed without departing from the core TMM.
This research contributed to the TMM community by explicating the complex process and contents of the TMM developed in a cocreating team. The goal as well as the strategy was negotiated and cocreated by team members along their way to the end. Thus, both the research method and the findings of this study paved a way to facilitate cross fertilizing between TMM researchers and interdisciplinary fields.
This research also provided interdisciplinary team leaders with tools to deploy key members, to diagnose the TMM development, and to balance the team between inertia and momentum. Finally, research limitations and future research suggestions are discussed.
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