Influence of Team Leaders' Situation Awareness on their Team's Situation Awareness and Performance

In complex operational environments, such as found in the military, it is necessary to consider not only the situation awareness (SA) of individual team members, but also the SA of the team as a whole. Given their important role in military combat operations, we hypothesized that the SA of team leaders (e.g., unit commanders) may have a significant influence on the SA and subsequent performance of those under their command. Accordingly, the overall objective of this research was to evaluate how much of the variance in a team's SA can be accounted for by the individual SA of the team's leader. To test our hypothesis, we performed an analysis of data collected at three experiments involving complex military operations. Results highlight the significant role of leaders' SA on their team's SA.