ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades there has been increasing interest in identifying properties of sport teams that are more than the sum of the properties of their members (Eccles & Tenenbaum, 2004; Salas et al., 1997). Team behaviors emerge from interactions of three or more players looking to cooperate and compete together to achieve common goals, while communicating through synergetic relations (Riley et al., 2011; Silva et al., 2013). Joint analysis of individual behaviors can translate to group behaviors as all players constrain and, in turn, are constrained by the dynamic, integrated system that they compose (Glazier, 2010). Expert teams are characterized by high levels of performance outcomes, achieved by the team’s effective utilization of member expertise and mastery of group processes (Salas et al., 2006). Research on expert, non-sport team performance (see Salas et al., 2006) has revealed that: i) expert members are able to combine their individual expertise and coordinate actions to achieve a common goal, ii) the team as a whole creates a synergy, iii) expert teams solve problems quickly and accurately, iv) when faced with novel situations, members can predict events and create new procedures, and v) expert teams are adaptive.
