(57g) Investigating the Role of Technology in Incident Management Team Cognition

In large-scale disasters such as Hurricane Harvey, multidisciplinary incident management teams (IMTs) work together as an integrated system. Understanding their coordinating dynamics constitutes the foundation to train, manage, and operate the entire system in a desirable way. Yet, most research on IMTs has overlooked the coordinating mechanism itself, referred to as cognition in IMTs. Despite the existence of well-established team cognition theories, their simple application may not comprehensively capture cognition in systems as complex as IMTs. Currently, much confusion about IMT cognition remains to be worked out as an important subject for a successful generation of empirical evidence informing future incident management policies and practices. In particular, there is little research investigating the role of technology in IMT cognition. Therefore, this paper aims to explore how IMTs utilize technology to cognitively function together as an integrated system. We conceptualized cognition in IMTs as technology-mediated interactions to achieve knowledge management goals and operationalized it through an observation of interactions at a high-fidelity IMT simulator. Through a social network analysis and a qualitative content analysis of the observed interactions, we provide an insight on the technological contribution to IMT cognition. We expect this study to inform future interventional and training manipulations for incident management practices, in addition to contributing to team cognition and incident management literature.