The effects of fully distributing social media information to team members on team situation awareness and team performance

Despite the expanding role of social media in natural disaster crisis management, its effect on team effectiveness remains poorly understood. This study applies collective information processing perspectives to examine how social media information distribution impacts team situation awareness and performance. We experimentally compared the full distribution of social media information with role-specific distribution of social media information across 65 simulated fire and rescue teams (260 participants) with varying levels of member familiarity. Our findings indicate that teams in the full distribution of information condition experienced a higher perceived information load, which consequently decreased team situation awareness and reduced team performance. Interestingly, we found moderating effects of team member familiarity such that unfamiliar teams performed worse in the role-specific distribution of information condition compared to the full distribution of information condition. We discuss the implications for both theory and practice in crisis management.