The Benefits of Flexible Team Interaction During Crises

Stachowski, Kaplan & Waller · Team Learning, Safety & Error, Complexity & Systems · Journal of Applied Psychology · 2009 · Paywalled

A direct empirical challenge to the idea that crews handle crises well by communicating consistently. Stachowski, Kaplan and Waller coded the verbal and nonverbal behaviour of 14 nuclear power plant control room crews, 61 licensed operators in all, through the first 15 minutes of a scripted simulated crisis in an exact replica of their own control room, then used pattern detection software and discriminant function analysis to compare higher against average performers. Higher performing crews showed fewer interaction patterns, and patterns that were shorter, involved fewer actors and carried less back and forth.

The authors set this up as a test between two defensible predictions and report the one that lost. Kanki and colleagues had found that better air transport crews varied their communication less, which supports training teams toward standardised response patterns; the competing view holds that routines which normally help will fail as a crisis evolves. Revisiting the recordings afterwards, the authors noticed that weaker crews let the written protocol drive their reading of the event and became passive recipients of information, while stronger crews used the protocol as a tool and interacted in ways it did not prescribe.

Two things temper it. The headline result on pattern frequency reaches only p = .08 across 14 crews, and the design compares crises with crises, so it cannot say whether these patterns differ from effective routine work, a limit the authors credit to a reviewer. The sample is one plant and all men. The finding that sits least comfortably with this corpus is not the main one: effective crews here were less inclusive and more directive, which cuts against the assumption that good team decisions involve everybody, and the authors say so, calling for training that achieves brevity without sacrificing shared knowledge.

Stachowski, A.A., Kaplan, S.A. and Waller, M.J. (2009) 'The benefits of flexible team interaction during crises', Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(6), pp. 1536-1543.

Neighbours (6)

• Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (paper)
• A Temporally Based Framework and Taxonomy of Team Processes (paper)
• Crisis-Ready Teams
• High Performing Teams
• Information Sharing and Decision-Making in Multidisciplinary Crisis Management Teams (paper)
• Setting the Tone: Early Interaction Patterns in Swift-Starting Teams as a Predictor of Effectiveness (paper)