Information and Command Strategies in Hierarchical Team Decisionmaking

This paper describes the Information and Command Strategy (ICS) experiment developed to investigate the effects of information structures and command strategies on resource allocation within a hierarchical team. This experiment was designed and operationalized and run across three independent variables: commander´s information structure, command strategy and task arrival rate. Various dependent variables were collected to quantify team performance, strategy, and coordination. The experimental results show that different commander´s information structures and command strategies affect significantly a team´s decisionmaking process in terms of coordination effort, resource allocation efficiency, and team performance under different tempos. When the commander has aggregate information, the teams achieve the best performance. If the commander is overloaded with too much information or does not have enough information, the team can not coordinate properly. Under these circumstances, the commander should be less involved in the decision process, and delegate coordination responsibility to subordinates.