Table 1.

Example definitions of “shared mental models” by discipline

Discipline	SMM Definition	References
Design Thinking	“SMM relate to a collective comprehension between all individuals in a team concerning several aspects of teamwork such as tasks, goals, and skills” “SMM embody knowledge structures that unite individuals in a team. The shared structures of SMM lay open a path on how individuals may perform as a team in their surroundings”	Redlich et al., 2017 [11]
Management	“A means by which organisations and individuals create and share meaning, thereby enabling a common understanding and the development of knowledge” “Frameworks of value and belief systems which act as the basis for analysis of any new ideas, concepts, policies and cultural developments being considered by a team”	Davidson & Blackman, 2005 [14]
Industrial Design Engineering	“Team members’ overlapping mental representation of key elements of the team’s task environment”	Bierhals et al., 2007 [15]
Psychology	“Organized knowledge structures, or sets of concepts and the associations among them” “Mental models are defined in terms of both content knowledge and, importantly, the structure (or organization) of that content knowledge”	Ross & Allen, 2012 [16]
Human-Computer Interaction	“When individual team members’ mental models align—when they have similar understandings of their shared task and each other’s role in it—then this ‘shared’ mental model will allow the team to perform better because they will be able to more accurately predict the needs and behaviors of their teammates”	Andrews et al., 2023 [17]
Information Systems	“Knowledge similarity within a team”	Espinosa et al., 2002 [18]
System Dynamics	Integration of “partial representations of a complex situation” that are often localized by department or discipline	Vennix, 1999 [19]
Industrial and Organizational Psychology	“An organizing structure of the relationships knowledge among the task the team is engaged in and how the team members will interact”	Salas, Sims, & Burke, 2005 [20]