Essay: Exploring Shared Mental Models Variations in Timeline / Method

 Exploring Shared Mental Models Variations in Timeline 
 LITERATURE REVIEW 
 METHOD 
 FINDINGS 
 CONCLUSIONS 
 ACKNOWLEDGMENT & REFERENCES 

RESEARCH QUESTION

According to the literatures above, it is noticed that existing works focusing on one time project in a closed system to explore the barriers and enablers of creating SMM and identifying different types of mental models during team works.

The research question therefore arises: how will the accumulated experiences of working together will influence the sharedness between the team members, that actually is the general condition every team who runs in real-life need to face.

METHOD

This is a research of multiple-case and inductive study. As we aimed to explore the degree of convergence among team members, Mohammed (2000) indicated this ‘[r]egard to the content of known elements as well as the structure between elements’. Case study is a research study that focus on understanding the dynamic context with tacit relationships, and multiple cases confirm the emerging conceptual insights with replication logic, which contributes to better generation with better validity (Eisenhardt & Graebner, 2007).

The research setting is the creative industries. Teams in these industries involved in deep SMM, for instance, operating complex tasks that require effective and efficient team works. This field is a particularly appropriate research site because creative industries are largely formed of small-scale dynamic enterprises (Carr, 2009), which can be seen as small groups that members works directly together under real-life context. The sharedness between team members had embedded in the timeline since the team started to work together, and this timeline enables us to explore the variations of SMM from enduring team works, based on the reality that a team generally performs multiple projects together in a long period of time.

In sum, we studied team member sharedness between small design studios for several reasons. First, such studios are likely to operate complex design tasks and work together closely, which require considerable SMM and their sharedness influence the performance directly. Second, they are embedded in real life and in fact had run through multiple projects together. Finally, they are likely to have certain extent of SMM, enabling us to focus on the variations of their sharedness in timeline, without concerning how they built it in the first beginning. These elements ensure the internal validity of exploring SMM variations, and making the sharedness between team members critical.

Cases selection

We selected three team collaborations between three design studios that lasted from three to five years, and based in the Netherlands. The three studios engaged in the same sector of furniture design, had certain achievements and visibilities in design, and participated in common design exhibitions such as the Milan design week. Sample details are in table 1.

A main advantage of our selection is its focus on collaborations between the partners that worked together since the studio started. The within-case study enables us to understand the view of each team member individually, and compare the views afterwards to find out the variation of sharedness, and their content of each known element as time goes by. On the other hand, the cross-case analysis among the three studio enables us to probe the sharedness pattern and its implications in a comprehensive way.

Data collection and sources

We used qualitative semi-structured interviews as data source, and simple quantitative questionnaires as complementarities. Although design studios are often busy in their schedule, we tried to show our sincerity with customized interview invitation by explaining how their works fascinates us and why we would like to ask them to be our interviewees. After that we conducted 6 semi-structure interviews of 30-60 minutes over three design studios, which means two members of each studio are interviewed to perform the following sharedness analysis. This resulted in 27 transcribed pages of primary source materials.

In order to probe the variations of SMM in timeline, we set up four sub-mental models according to Bierhals et al. (2007) proposed as the topics in the interview guide. The four topics included: ‘competence’ for the motivation that drives this studio to go further; ‘tasks’ for the general design strategy in this studio; ‘process’ for their working pattern and ‘team member’ for the similarities and differences among each other. All of the four topics are followed by their relevant matters questions in each sector. In addition to the structured topics, the time points of ‘beginning’, ‘middle’ and ‘now’ are embedded in questions organically as well. Overall, listing and exploring the four aspects of SMM enables us to find richer and more reliable sharedness patterns (Eisenhardt, 1989). As for the questionnaire after each interview, we ask participants to assess the sharedness between he/she and their partner with the four aspects of sub-mental models. Since quantitative evidence can indicate relationships that may not be salient to the researcher in qualitative data (Eisenhardt, 1989), which formulate a clear result to support the interviews.

We tried to reduce informant bias with several methods. First, following the interview guide during interviews allow us to measure what we intend to measure and increase the reliability of this research (Eisenhardt, 1989). Second, we planned a brief but clear opening instruction about what SMM and sharedness is to the interviewees, the introduction is opened to discuss, and could be seen as building sharedness with interviewees to ensure the validity of this interview. Third, we visualized and printed some of the jargons with neutral icons to help interviewees to grasp each questions’ intentions.

Method execution

During the interviews, we found that the semi-structured interview guide worked well, the 6 transcriptions and 3 codes comparison tables can be found in the appendix.

Nevertheless the questionnaire didn’t work effectively, participants tend to pick the scores with different aspects of intuitive. For instance, some of them mentioned that they worked nice so the scores are definitely high, while others thought they worked great but intermediate scores drive them to go further. This kind of bias disturbs the reliability of the questionnaires; therefore we discard this complementary data in the analyzing phase.

As for the time points, participants are capable to describe the beginning and current situation of their collaborations clearly. Yet the middle period remains fuzzy and forgotten. This may due to the incapable of us to execute this research in a long time approach to keep track of their sharedness in each time point. Thus we only keep the time points of ‘beginning’ and ‘now’ during coding to maintain the validity of the transcripts.

Analyzing sharedness between each member

The primary units of analysis among the collaboration between the two members are the time points: ‘beginning’ and ‘now’. We define ‘beginning’ if the participants described matters or thoughts that are not occurring anymore. For instance, “...we just started and did everything a little bit together and discussed a lot, took a lot of time.”, is a quote from one of the member in Studio WM, in which it implies the condition during the first beginning of their studio.

On the other hand, the definitions of ‘now’ are according to the descriptions that are happening and keep going in the current moment. For instance, the quote “... we know our own parts, we don’t really talk about but we know what we actually in charge of these things.” implies the how they work together after the run-in period, and we therefore define it as a ‘now’ tense.

Yet the participants also mentioned some of the things that are generally taking place all the time. In these cases, we distributed the codes to both ‘past’ and ‘now’ in order to meet the real conditions consistently. This coding method divided the transcriptions of each sub-mental model into two sectors in the timeline. Within each time sector in each sub-mental model, we listed the codes that are generated from the two studio members as the analyzing model for collaborations among the team as Table 2.

During the analyzing phase, if both of the members shared similar codes in the same time sector, then we give the codes a core code name and define it as the similarities between them. For instance, one of the member in studio WM had a code identified as ‘realized the extra value of working together’, while another one had a code identified as ‘awared better results in co-work’. In this case, the core code was given as ‘realized the extra value of co-working’.

In the matter of only one of the members mentioned and emphasize a code during the interview, we define it as the differences of the team’s SMM. For instance, one of the members in Formafantasma had numerous codes referring to operating studio business, the codes are recognized as ‘communicate to broad audience’, ‘present in international context’, ‘right place and right tool to communicate our work’, ‘do limited edition projects’, while another member rarely mention theses issues.

In order to make the codes synthetical, we examine the contents of the core codes of similarities and differences and labeled them into three cognitive levels: facts, feelings and reflections, according to the literature that Patton(2002) referred “[o]pinions and feeling are likely to be more grounded and meaningful.”, since SMM is regard to the sharedness of mental activities between the team. For instance, the code ‘worked together before studio setup’ was identified as facts, while the code ‘enjoyed the work’ was identified as feelings. Code with personal judgments such as ‘same passion drives us move forward’ was regarded as reflections level.

Finding the sharedness pattern

By labeling the cognition levels, the model reveals which level of cognition occurs more in which sub-mental model. For instance, in the case of Studio WM, the duo had more ‘facts’ core codes in the process and task models; while the codes related to ‘feelings’ and ‘reflections’ appears more in the competence and team member model. This initial categorizing enables us to explore deeper in the content of sharedness.


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