Physiological Compliance during a Three Member Collaborative Computer Task

Measuring team performance and physiological compliance (PC) within a team have gained interest in the last few decades. The team’s performance or functioning of a team is overseen by attributes such as collaboration, coordination, attitudes and motivation. Team emergent states such as situational awareness, trust, emotions and mutual understanding influence the attributes of teams. This study examines the relationship between PC and collaboration. It also investigates how the cognitive state influences this relationship. Seventeen teams, each with three members, participated in a collaborative simulated task, while their electrocardiogram (ECG) activity was recorded via a chest strap device. Short-term time-domain measures of heart rate variability (HRV) were derived for each participant. PC was established using the mean of the cross-correlation (CC) between dyads within a team. A linear regression model was employed to examine the relationship between PC and self-reported measures of team collaboration. This in turn will be applied to investigate how cognitive state between team members influences that relationship. The results have shown a statistically significant (p<0.05) positive relationship between PC and collaboration. In conclusion, PC has the potential to be an objective method to quantity teamwork effectiveness where it can be assessed via self-reported collaboration.