What's the key ingredient to high performance when teams function in demanding, high-stress environments? Mary Waller and her co-authors have studied this question in the context of airplane cockpit crews. They published a paper recently titled "More than a feeling: rapport and complex task performance in teams." They examined three elements of rapport within these teams while they worked in flight simulators:
- Interpersonal liking: how positively did the individuals engage with one another
- Emotional positivity: how optimistic and positive was the emotional tone of their conversations
- Interpersonal coordination: How well synchronized was their verbal communication and action
Sally Blount summarized their key finding: “Positivity and liking are great. But unless you can translate that positivity and liking into improved collaboration, it doesn’t have a significant impact on team performance.” After analyzing video recordings of the teams in the simulator, the researchers observed how the coordination among the high-performing teams tended to be more complex, nuanced, and synergistic. Kellogg Insight summarized the findings:
Overall, the researchers found that, on average, the teams with the highest levels of interpersonal coordination communicated more often, especially with commands, observations, suggestions, and laughter. The interactions between these pilots also were “significantly more complex” than the interactions between pilots with lower interpersonal coordination.
“In the low-interpersonal-coordination groups, you had less communication and also less encouragement and building off of each other,” Blount says. “So, if things aren’t going well, you might be saying, ‘This guy isn’t helping me, so I’m going to hunker down,’ versus ‘Okay, we got this,’ and ‘I see that. What do you see?’”
Not surprisingly, the pilots themselves did not always perceive the link between rapport and performance correctly.
Interestingly, when liking and positivity were high, the pilots themselves thought they performed better, but that perception did not always translate into better expert evaluations. The tendency to associate more-positive interactions with better performance is common within teams, but it can be misleading and is a well-known contributor to groupthink, Blount says.
