Team cognition and expert teams: Developing insights from cross –disciplinary analysis of exceptional teams

Abstract

The sports sciences have long been involved in investigations of team process and performance; nonetheless, there is a surprising paucity of cross‐disciplinary interaction between researchers in team cognition and sports psychology. The overarching purpose of this invited special issue is to redress this problem by providing an outlet for leading researchers in the field of team cognition to discuss their own and related work in the context of sports psychology. The cognitive processes arising during the complex and dynamic interaction of teams are the focus of this special issue. In order to ground these discussions, in this lead article to our special issue we discuss some of the key concepts emerging from the literature on team cognition. First, we briefly describe the study of cognition in teamwork and then we discuss the etymology of a subset of key concepts emerging from this study. Our goal is to highlight the utility of such discussions and provide some initial insights for how to strengthen cross‐disciplinary research