Team composition and cohesion in spaceflight missions

Selection, training, cohesion and psychosocial adaptation influence performance and, as such, are relevant factors to consider while preparing for costly, long-duration spaceflight missions in which the performance objectives will be demanding, endurance will be tested and success will be critical.

During the selection of crew members, throughout their training and during their psychosocial adaptation to the mission environment, there are several opportunities to encourage optimal performance and, in turn, minimize the risk of failure.

Evidence linking crew selection, composition, training, cohesion or psychosocial adaptation to performance errors is uncertain. Many NASA-backed studies regarding spaceflight, as well as space analogs, emphasize the need to consider these factors. The research on performance errors caused by team factors is ambiguous and currently, no systematic attempt has been undertaken to measure performance errors due to psychosocial team factors during space flight.

As a result, evidence does not help identify what is needed to reduce the risk of performance errors in space. Ground-based evidence demonstrates that decrements in individual and team performance are related to the psychosocial characteristics of teamwork. Also, there are reasons to believe that ground support personnel and crew members experience many of the same basic issues regarding teamwork and performance.

The study of performance errors implies that human actions may be simplified into a dichotomy of "correct" or "incorrect" responses. It has been argued that this dichotomy is a harmful oversimplification, and that it would be more productive to focus on the variability of human performance and how organizations can manage that variability.

There are two particular problems that occur when focusing on performance errors:

Research shows that humans are fairly adept at correcting or compensating for performance errors before such errors result in recognizable or recordable failures. Most failures are recorded only when multiple errors occur and are not preventable.

For NASA's purposes, a team is commonly understood to be a collection of individuals that is assigned to support and achieve a particular mission. One way of selecting for teams is to identify those individuals who are best suited to work in teams, ensuring that each individual team member possesses the qualities and skills that lend themselves to optimal teamwork. Many organizations use competency frameworks to select individuals utilizing a "team-working" competency that measures how an individual works with other team members (support, knowledge sharing, etc.). These "teamwork" competencies have been shown to help predict individual performance in teams.

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