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Summary Organizational efforts to improve team effectiveness in crisis situations primarily have focused on team training initiatives and, to a lesser degree, on staffing teams with respect to members' ability, experience, and functional backgrounds. Largely neglected in these efforts is the emotional component of crises and, correspondingly, the notion of staffing teams with consideration for their affective makeup. To address this void, we examined the impact of team member dispositional positive affect (PA) on team crisis effectiveness and the role of felt negative emotion in transmitting that influence. A study of 21 nuclear power plant crews engaged in crisis training simulations revealed that homogeneity in PA, but not mean‐level PA, was associated with greater team effectiveness. Mediation analysis suggested that homogeneity in PA leads to greater team effectiveness by reducing the amount of negative emotions that team members experience during crises. Furthermore, homogeneity in PA compensated for lower mean‐level PA in predicting effectiveness. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for understanding and further exploring the importance of affective factors and especially team affective composition in team crisis performance. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This chapter explores the attributes of successful leaders from the perspective of a performance requirements approach, providing a broad overview of determined factors within the context of performance requirements of successful leaders. It describes three broad domains of leadership requirements: cognitive, social, and motivational. The survey of leader performance requirements summarizes the conceptual basis for an array of attributes, arranged in discrete sets, which are likely to differentiate successful from unsuccessful leaders. There has also been a recent increase in the number of multivariate studies of leadership that do draw from these different sets of prescribed leader attributes. It is noted that cognitive, social, self-motivational, and other sets of leader individual differences are linked with leadership outcomes. The research domain on the attributes of successful leaders can provide some rich insights to both leader researchers and practitioners.