Never waste a good crisis : Examining team coordination breakdowns during crisis situations

Abstract

During crisis situations, teams are more prone to coordination breakdowns (CBs) that are characterized by a temporary, diminished ability to function effectively as a team. However, team research currently lacks robust approaches for identifying transitions from effective team functioning to CBs. With the current study, we aim to develop such robust approaches, and to deepen our understanding of how team coordination dynamics across various interaction modalities reflect CBs. Consequently, we used audiovisual data from four person teams involved in a stressful collaborative game task to manually identify CBs. Next, we set out to computationally identify CBs by applying continuous measures of team coordination (windowed synchronization coefficient and multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis) to photoplethysmogram and electrodermal activity data obtained during the task, and identifying transitions therein with change point and nonlinear prediction algorithms. In the current paper, we present promising computational CB identification approaches that can identify up to 96% of the manually identified CBs. Our findings contribute theoretically and methodologically to the systematic investigation of CBs, which may ultimately facilitate the support of teams in responding to and mitigating negative consequences of crisis situations.

Quantifying synchronization in groups with three or more members using SyncCalc: The driver-empath model of group dynamics.

“…S E is indifferent to the data type and not limited to ED, and only requires time series data. Researchers have started using S E with heart rate (Danyluck et al, 2020; Rosen, 2021) and photoplethysmography (van Eijndhoven et al, 2022) with team data. At present it is too early to make further generalizations about the efficacy of the various physiological measures for detecting synchrony.…”