The Need for Diversity and Distribution of Leadership Roles: Insights From Astronaut Teams on Decision Making

• In Event: Presentation | The Utility of Teamwork: Diversity, Principles, and Roles to Improve Group Dynamics

Short Description

Making quality decisions is a vital aspect of team success and presents far-reaching societal impacts, on earth and beyond. Utilizing a mixed-method approach, I studied 9 astronaut teams as they completed challenging, information asymmetric team decision making tasks. I identified five emergent leadership roles that help drive quality team decision making. I also discovered that teams performed better when these roles were distributed across the team rather than being the responsibility of just one or two individuals. These findings present key considerations for leaders across all domains and sectors committed to maximizing their team’s effectiveness.

Detailed Abstract

Making quality decisions is a vital aspect of team success, whether a team of surgeons
deciding between competing emergency procedures, an executive board selecting a strategic initiative to ensure an organization’s viability, policymakers deciding on legislation to better society, or astronauts deciding which of three failing life systems should be attended to first. One of the most established and effective ways to study team decision making is the hidden profile paradigm (Faulmüller et al., 2010; Sohrab et al., 2015; Stasser & Titus, 1985).

Hidden profiles are tasks in which team members receive distinct sets of information that include informational items only known to a single individual (unique information) and informational items known by all members of the team (common information). These individual information sets are designed to lead individuals to favor suboptimal preferences, and the team can only identify the best option by pooling individual information into a combined team information set (Stasser & Titus, 1985).

In this study, I analyzed nine 4-person teams participating in NASA’s Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. HERA is a habitat intended to simulate long-duration space flight (Cromwell & Neigut, 2014), and the teams in this study were ingressed in the habitat for 45-day missions. As part of their mission, teams completed five hidden profile tasks where they were tasked to decide on 1) the most urgent module to repair on the International Space Station, 2) the most threatening asteroid approach Earth, 3) a planet to explore as a potential human colony, 4) the safest Mars landing site, and 5) a fifth potential team member to join their crew.

Using thematic analysis, a qualitative technique for systematically identifying, organizing, and offering insights about a data set (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2012), I evaluated recordings of teams completing the hidden profile tasks. This review identified five essential leadership roles that enhanced team decision making. The five roles consisted of 1) initiating structure and process, 2) maintaining structure and process, 3) soliciting information from the team, 4) clarifying information, and 5) establishing decision criteria. Further, analysis of team discussions identified that teams performed better when these leadership roles were distributed across the team, rather than being the responsibility of one or two team members. When teams did not distribute the roles, the roles were poorly performed or abandoned altogether by the single or few individuals expected to execute them.

It is worth acknowledging that the sample of this study is not the typical lab setting and that most teaming experiences do not occur in outer space or related simulations. However, extant academic work has established space and other unconventional environments as fruitful avenues through which to develop our understanding of leadership and teamwork on Earth (Bell et al., 2018; Mesmer-Magnus et al., 2016). In fact, these settings might provide greater insights than a traditional lab or field studies due to the high fidelity of the tasks being completed and the vast amounts of data reviewed while teams complete these tasks (c.f., Zhang et al., 2018).

This study provides meaningful implications for leaders and teams working together in any industry or domain. For teams hoping to leverage the diverse knowledge, perspectives, and expertise of their members to make quality decisions, this study identifies specific and essential leadership roles that need to be filled during the decision making process. More broadly, this study pushes back against the notion that leadership is a singular, title-centric endeavor. Rather it reinforces the proposition that leadership is an emergent phenomenon that can be enhanced when shared among multiple individuals (Carson et al., 2007; Pearce & Conger, 2002), even in frontiers humankind has yet to explore.

Participant

• Ilya Gokhman, Oglethorpe University
  Presenter