Team Cognition and Team Performance in Sport

First, this paper presents the key elements of a research program labeled “Team Cognition”, originally developed in the field of industrial/organizational psychology. Leaders of this field of research estimate that team functioning and team performance have to be studied with regard to the cognitive phenomena involved in team coordination. These phenomena are considered in terms of cognitive contents sharing (sharing as a product and sharing as a process) between teammates. This line of research brings new perspectives on team expertise in sport. Recently some studies in sport focused on the content and process of sharing between partners. Thus, we secondly present the main results of recent studies on team cognition in different sports (table tennis doubles, sailing crews, basketball teams). These studies mainly principally investigated the shared context (i.e., the nature and content of the contextual information that was shared between the partners). Results underlined the dynamic and indeterminated properties of contextual information sharing, the co-construction process of mutual intelligibility, and coordination modes between team’s members. These results lead to new elements of understanding about collective performance in sport, and more generally about collective activity in work situations.