Social Network Analysis, Team Cohesion and Meaningfulness of Tasks: A Comparison Between Two Different Command and Control Paradigms
Abstract
What is this report about?
This report is about subjecting commonly held beliefs about the benefits of Network Enabled Capability (NEC) to direct empirical tests from a Sociotechnical Systems perspective. It is hypothesised that NEC should not just lead to widespread changes in the type and structure of communication but that this should be mirrored in a corresponding improvement in the experience of people working within it.
Background and reasoning behind the work
There is good reason for wanting to endow command and control with open systems behaviour under the aegis of NEC. One reason is that experience within various civilian domains is encouraging; in particular, the use of Sociotechnical Systems theory has been bestowing NEC-like properties upon organisations for over fifty years and has an impressive track record of success. This provides the theoretical background necessary for exploring not just the technical effectiveness of NEC systems but also their success in terms of the experience of people working within them; an experience that is shown to be critical for eliciting the type of self-synchronisation hoped for.
What was undertaken in the research?
The Brunel University NEC test-bed enabled a traditional hierarchical command and control organisation to be pitted against a network centric alternative on a common task, performed thirty times, by two teams. Social Network Analysis provided a means to analyse the content and structure of communications which was complemented by a self-report cohesion questionnaire.
What was discovered?
The results of a Social Network Analysis show that the NEC condition facilitated more communications and informationally richer ones too. There was also structural evidence to suggest the presence of elevated levels of distributed leadership and autonomy. The main finding was that this translated into a subjective experience of the same, as measured by a simple self-report team cohesion scale.
Military relevance of the work
The current study provides an interesting advance on existing methods and an empirical basis to support one of the central assumptions driving forward the implementation of NEC.
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