SBIR-STTR Award

Consistent with the Army's effort to address current personnel issues (e.g., attrition and retention) by anticipating future personnel needs, this proposal describes steps to develop an assessment of team oriented knowledge, skill, and attitudinal competencies. This assessment tool will help address the Army's attrition issues through diagnosis of soldiers' teamwork training needs; in conjunction with other assessment instruments it may also be useful to recruiters. Moreover, to the extent that the Army will become increasingly dependent on teams in its warfighting mission, methods for assessing soldiers' ability to work and function in a team environment will become critical to the Army's success. Given the primary goal of this proposal, teamwork measures will assess "team competencies held at the individual level." These competencies are of interest because they enable individuals to function effectively in a wide variety of teams and across a wide variety of team settings. The development of a tool to assess team competencies is of direct operational benefit to the U.S. Army and other Military Services. Moreover, it is anticipated that follow-on funding will be secured from two sources: (a) non-STTR follow-on funding from the military market, and (b) private-sector funding from the commercial assessment/testing market.

The military's traditional reliance on teams to perform vital missions has become even more pronounced as the military transforms itself into a lighter, more mobile, and more deployable force. Although the military does an exceptional job of imparting the technical skills that are required for mission performance, considerably less progress has been made in understanding other factors that make a "good team player." One goal of this project is to identify the dispositional characteristics that comprise the effective team player. In Phase I of this STTR project, we examined the construct of team orientation and defined the core personality facets or traits that underlie this construct. We presented an approach to assessing team orientation using a conditional reasoning test. In Phase II of this project, we will develop, test, and validate these assessment tools. Satisfactory completion of this work will result in the development of innovative and robust team competency assessment tools to support the Army in building the force of the future. The product will be an empirically-tested conditional reasoning test that can be used to link team competencies-specifically team member attitudes-to valued outcomes such as team performance, satisfaction, and retention. A large market exists for the commercialization of this product for individual assessment and personnel selection and placement within the public and private sectors. No satisfactory tool for the assessment of team orientation currently exists.

Keywords:
Teams, Assessment, Teamwork, Retention