Shared functional representation in cooperative tasks‐the example of shift changeover

The growing complexity of industrial systems emphasizes the problems of coordination of operators' activities. Studies on collective work are more and more numerous. However, most of them are focused on cooperation between operators with different abilities and a well-defined problem to solve. Within this framework, shift changeover seems to be a specific collective situation. This paper will try to demonstrate the interest of the concept of shared functional representation between operators through two case studies about shift changes. These analyses have shown how the lack of shared functional representation between operators can contribute to a nonoptimum shift change. @ 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.