Ergonomics

The late Steve Jobs stated that ““My model for business is The Beatles. They were four guys who kept each other kind of negative tendencies in check. They balanced each other and the total was greater than the sum of the parts. That's how I see business: great things in business are never done by one person, they're done by a team of people.”

In psychology; cognitive human factors investigates the mental processes which are held responsible for human errors in everyday life (Norman 1981; Reason, 1992). There is an assumption that errors aren’t caused by erratic irresponsible behavior however they’re a result of how an individual reacts to a situation, his memory, how he makes decisions and how he communicates. This definition recommends looking into how human errors happen by analyzing the human information processing system though the human information system is complex. Our human mind is restricted in processing a lot of information at the same time. Memory, perception of reality and attention span has its limitations (Cohen et al, 1990, Fougnie & Marois, 2006; Wickens, 2002).

For the purpose of this paper, I would like to discuss team cognition and learning theories and apply them to everyday occupational scenarios that are heavily dependent upon teams to better them.

Team cognition or how a team collectively processes a situation is increasingly being measured due to the demand for efficient teams in the workplace. A growing number of tasks happen within the context of complex sociotechnical systems. Their information processing requirements are associated with occupations related to emergency response, transportation, software development ,military operations, power plant operations and medicine to name a few of that exceed the limitations of individual cognition.

Team cognition is relevant to human factors because measures of team cognition provide insight to variables in team acquisition with relation to competency and performance of a complex...