Catarina Santos

The concept of shared mental models refers to the shared understanding among team members about how they should behave in different situations. This article aimed to develop a new shared mental model measure, specifically designed for the refereeing context. A cross-sectional study was conducted with three samples: national and regional football referees (n = 133), national football referees and assistant referees and national futsal referees (n = 277), and national futsal referees (n = 60). The proposed version of the Referee Shared Mental Models Measure (RSMMM) has 13 items that are reflected on a single factor structure. The RSMMM presented good validity evidence both based on the internal structure and based on relations to other variables (presenting positive associations with team work engagement, team adaptive performance, and team effectiveness). Such promising psychometric properties point to an optimistic outlook regarding its use to measure shared mental models in futsal and football referee teams.

Na segunda metade do século XVIII, a circulação de novos modelos culturais – muito em especial o conhecimento científico veiculado pela figura do engenheiro militar e seus saberes – conduziu a uma reformulação dos argumentos identitários da elite de Luanda, e dos lugares de memória a eles associados. Ao argumento da (re)conquista de Luanda aos holandeses, situada num tempo ciclicamente rememorado – os antigos conquistadores – vem acrescentar-se o argumento da naturalidade – os angolenses. Essa nova formulação, que decorre também de uma reelaboração do arquivo e/ou biblioteca coloniais, seria daí por diante, ao longo do século XIX, retomada e associada ao tempo em que foi produzida (o tempo do governador D. Francisco Inocêncio de Sousa Coutinho), e assim também convertida num (novo) lugar de memória.

The aim of this study was to analyze the association between coaches’ experience and their perceptions on the implementation of a long-term athletic development model created in 2016 by the Portuguese Swimming Federation. Eighty-six swimming coaches were assembled in groups according to their experience level: “novice”, “intermediate”, and “experienced”, and they answered a questionnaire with the following items: awareness of the existing model acceptance usefulness for practice, and implementation of this model by their peers. Regardless of experience, ~67% of the coaches were aware of the model. Among those, a large number showed acceptance and confidence in its usefulness for their daily practice. Most coaches showed concerns about the fact that their peers do not respect the model frameworks, declaring the search for their swimmers’ immediate success as the main cause for such behavior. The results also showed an association between experience and knowledge about the model’s existence [χ2 = 10.223, p < 0.01, V = 0.345], and experienced coaches exhibited better knowledge than their intermediate [χ2 = 9.555, p < 0.01, V = 0.393] or novice [χ2 = 5.926, p = 0.02, V = 0.314] counterparts. While there was an association between the coaches’ experience and knowledge about the LTAD model’s existence, this situation does not seem to influence the way coaches accept and understand the usefulness of the model for their daily practice.

This essay analyses the circulation of political models and administrative practices drawn from the Enlightenment statecraft of metropolitan Portugal and their inscription in specific colonial contexts of Angola in the mid-eighteenth century. The purpose here is to show how these models had to be ‘unpacked’ when confronted with foreign contexts, reconfigured and even reinvented for local circumstances. During the 1750s, the Lisbon government conceived a new imperial project to territorialize the colony through the intellectual and physical appropriation of this Central African space. In order to do so, three levels of this administrative knowledge are distinguished: the quantification and systematization of information, cartography, and the archive. For each, this essay demonstrates how they were made available to, appropriated by or transformed by both the colonial and the African societies in the colonial context

Literature on Shared Mental Models has been burgeoning in recent years and this has provided increasingly detailed insight and evidence into the importance of SMMs within specific contexts. However, because past research predominantly focused on SMM structure as measured by diverse, context-dependent measures, a consolidated multi-dimensional measure of perceived SMMs that can be used across diverse team contexts is currently lacking. Furthermore, different conceptualizations of the dimensionality of SMMs exist, which further impedes the comparison between studies. These key limitations might hinder future development in the SMM literature. We argue that the field of SMMs has now matured enough that it is possible to take a deductive approach and evaluate the prior studies in order to refine the key SMMs dimensions, operationalizations, and measurement. Hence, we take a three-stage approach to consolidate existing literature scale-based measures of SMMs, using four samples. Ultimately, this leads to a 20-item five-dimensional scale – the Five Factor Perceived Shared Mental Model Scale. Our scale provides scholars with a tool which enables the measurement, and comparison, of SMMs across diverse team contexts. It offers practitioners the option to more straightforwardly assess perceived SMMs in their teams, allowing the identification of challenges in their teams and facilitating the design of appropriate interventions.