By Rylee Linhardt, Undergraduate Research Assistant

Multidisciplinary teams are becoming more common, and are especially prevalent in healthcare and engineering professions. These teams differ from others in that multidisciplinary teams combine two or more members of different disciplines to solve problems. I had the opportunity to work with CORE lab members Tiffany Bisbey and Jensine Paoletti observing multidisciplinary teams in a two day simulation-based competition to identify behaviors that could potentially contribute to the success of decision-making teams. The competition was a team-based learning experience where participants were met with random and unpredictable challenges that could impact their performance in the creation of a profitable oil and gas organization. The primary goal when observing the participants was to identify behavioral indicators of teamwork and resilient performance that contribute to the success of the team.

The overall research question guiding our observations was how do teams make adjustments to dynamic situational demands and transition back to normal or established patterns of interaction. A few specific behaviors we observed were team monitoring, conflict management, and assertiveness between team members. These behaviors were used to infer participants’ perspectives of challenges and setbacks, roles of specific individuals, and resilience performance trajectories. Critical points of observation occurred immediately after an obstacle or challenge took place, where we tuned into the attitudes and behaviors exhibited, and the extent of their impact on the team’s performance.

With this exploratory study, we learned about some of the aspects of teamwork that may be particularly important for decision-making teams. For instance, we found that many team members put themselves into designated roles to distribute tasking for the challenge. For example, when needing to communicate with other teams during a negotiation task, there was typically a single individual that negotiated for the rest of the team. Since they were labeled as ‘negotiator,’ another team member may have been more suited for relaying knowledge to team members or used logic to guide the team to make decisions. In short, each person had a set of skills that determined their placement on the team.

Although determining roles through skill set is important, a team must also learn to work together in a timely manner. Teams that came to consensus quickly had better results than those that could not agree on a plan of action; which is an interesting observation, as rushing through or skipping over the planning process may hurt performance in traditional, non-decision making teams. We saw that teams spending a longer time coming to an agreement exhibited uninhibited communication, speaking their minds when they felt necessary; which could implicate the importance of psychological safety in decision-making teams. However, because this simulated challenge was only two days long, psychological safety was less important than in the context of a long-term team.

Overall we found that a balance of interdependent tasking is key for the success of the team. Teams in this challenge that create separate roles while defining a clear leader seemed to have the most success when tackling challenges. While creating such habits are important, behaviors that were motivating and encouraging seemed to have a positive impact on collaboration. Having a combination of task interdependence and delegation, structured roles, and motivation created a dynamic that may facilitate resilient team performance trajectories in response to threats in multidisciplinary decision-making teams.