The Role of Communication Values in Swift Starting Action Teams: IT Insights from Flight Crew Experience

McKinney et al · Voice & Silence, Team Learning, Safety & Error · Information & Management · 2004 · Paywalled

Where the swift starting action team comes from, and an early statement of the psychological safety argument in aviation vocabulary. McKinney, Barker, Smith and Davis define a subset of action teams whose members are well trained strangers, who must perform from the moment they begin, and who face high stakes immediately. The flight deck is their model case, and they note that 73% of 37 recent air carrier mishaps occurred on the first day that pilot and copilot flew together. Against that they propose communication values, meaning expressed ideals about how the team will talk, as an antecedent both of effective task communication and of team performance.

Six ride-along observers scored 19 United States Air Force KC-135 refuelling crews in flight on comparable missions, judges then sorted the crews by whether communication values had been expressed early, and the comparison was made by analysis of variance. Both hypotheses were supported.

The values that matter are the interesting part. Directness is set against vagueness: being ten knots slow rather than a little off airspeed. The second is the captain's expressed vulnerability, which the authors take from Helmreich as the leading discriminator between excellent and poor crews, in that the best captains make plain they expect their first officers to question them. Read alongside Edmondson, that is a leader deliberately lowering the interpersonal cost of challenge, described fifteen years earlier and without the term.

The limits are plain. Nineteen crews of one aircraft type in one air force, observer scoring rather than transcripts, an analysis of variance across three judge-assigned groups, and an unusual venue, an information systems journal, which frames the findings for IT project teams. Note also that this is not the companion paper on how such teams get off the ground, which is a separate 2005 article in Management Communication Quarterly and remains wanted.

McKinney, E.H., Barker, J.R., Smith, D.R. and Davis, K.J. (2004) 'The role of communication values in swift starting action teams: IT insights from flight crew experience', Information & Management, 41(8), pp. 1043-1056.

Neighbours (7)

• Crew Resource Mgmt
• The Evolution of Crew Resource Management Training in Commercial Aviation (paper)
• The Vulnerable System: An Analysis of the Tenerife Air Disaster (paper)
• Collective Mind in Organizations: Heedful Interrelating on Flight Decks (paper)
• PS in Aviation
• Speaking Up at Work
• Setting the Tone: Early Interaction Patterns in Swift-Starting Teams as a Predictor of Effectiveness (paper)