The Development of the Five Factor Shared Mental Models Scale

Literature on Shared Mental Models (SMMs) has been burgeoning in recent years. Although this has provided increasingly detailed insight and evidence into the importance of SMMs across contexts, it has also become apparent that there are key limitations which might hinder future development. First, SMMs are operationalized and measured via in-depth, context dependent measures, which complicates the creation of a coherent body of knowledge. Second, different conceptualizations of the dimensionality of SMMs exist, which may complicate the comparison findings from different studies. We argue that the field of SMMs has now matured enough that it is possible to take a deductive approach and evaluate the prior studies in order to refine the key SMMs dimensions and operationalizations. Hence, we take a three-stage approach to distil measurement items from the literature, using four samples to do so. Ultimately, this leads to a 30-item five-dimensional scale (i.e., equipment, task execution, interaction, team composition, and temporal SMMs) which provides scholars with a tool which enables the measurement, and comparison, of SMMs across diverse team contexts. It offers practitioners the option to straightforwardly assess SMMs in their teams, allowing them to more readily identify challenges in their teams and design appropriate interventions for improvement.