Friday, October 10, Dr. Joan R. Rentsch, professor of communication studies at the University of Tennessee, will present “Communicating to Build Knowledge in Decision-Making Teams.”
Decision-making teams perform best when team members capitalize on their different perspectives and information to build team knowledge. Building team knowledge requires team members to communicate uniquely held information, to transfer knowledge to teammates, to operate relevant knowledge available in the team and to collaboratively integrate and structure knowledge possessed by the team.
However, research has shown that team members tend to communicate information ineffectively, which limits team knowledge building. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to test a team training strategy to examine its effects on distributed decision-making teams. The results indicated that the team training strategy may support high quality team decision making. This research was conducted with funding from the Office of Naval Research.
The presentation begins at 12 p.m. in the Thompson Boling Arena Cafe, Rooms C-D. The UT Science Forum is free and open to the public.