Towards tailor-made team training

This paper focuses on the relationship between team performance, task architecture and the design of team training. In exploring this relationship an experiment was carried out in which the effect of two cross-training instructions was examined on the performance of teams with an open versus fixed task architecture. The results indicate that an interaction generic instruction, consisting of general rules and guidelines, has a positive effect on the performance of teams with an open task architecture. The results also show that teams characterized by an open task architecture benefit the most of an explicit cross-training instruction focussing on task related interactions. The results of this research study will be discussed in terms of their relevance for designing effective training interventions, which take relevant team and task characteristics into account.