Welcome to OPTIMA Lab

We study learning, motivation, affect and performance for individuals, teams, and organizational systems. We are particularly interested in process dynamics and how phenomena arising from individual interaction processes in teams and systems underlie the emergence of collective phenomena (e.g., team cognition, team cohesion, and team performance), how such phenomena evolve and change over time, and the implications of these dynamics for effectiveness and adaptation.

We use a variety of research methods in our work, depending on the phenomenon of interest, ranging from surveys and lab experiments to low- and high-fidelity task simulation studies/experiments to observational studies of teams ‘in the wild.’ We also employ sophisticated computational modeling and agent-based simulation techniques to conduct virtual experiments that can examine dynamic, multilevel system phenomena at scale.

OPTIMA Lab is directed by Steve W. J. Kozlowski, PhD and Georgia T. Chao, PhD. It is located in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Florida. We take a team science approach (https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/the-science-of-team-science) to our research, pulling together teams of experts with different, yet complementary, multidisciplinary capabilities to meet the challenges of our cutting-edge research. Team members are both local and distributed; thus, our projects typically involve a combination of face-to-face and virtual teamwork.

Please check out our project websites for more detailed information about our research, people, and publications.