Command Style and Team Performance in Dynamic Decision-Making Tasks

Real-world tasks involving dynamic decision making are commonly distributed among a number of people, the organizational structure being typically hierarchical in nature. However, the optimal way to divide the responsibility for decision making among team members is not obvious. Should leaders make all decisions and communicate specific actions for subordinates to carry out? Or should decision-making responsibility be shared, with leaders communicating their intentions to subordinates, who then decide upon appropriate actions and carry these out? This is fundamentally an issue of the relative effectiveness of contrasting command styles. This chapter addresses this issue by reporting a study using teams of three persons (a leader and two subordinates) in a computer-simulated forestfirefighting task. The results indicate a marked performance advantage for teams in which the leader is required to command by the communication of intentions rather than by the communication of orders for specific actions. An intention-based command style, which creates a more even distribution of decision-making responsibility across ranks, was found to result in a more equal distribution of the cognitive workload, to take greater advantage of subordinates' local knowledge, and to allow for greater overall team productivity.