Trajectory of the Interplay Between Team Cognitive Processes and Collective Emotions During Crisis

Abstract

Organizations commonly use teams to rapidly and appropriately respond to crises. These teams must face a multidimensional challenge because crises not only comprise ill-defined, complex problems, but also exert high emotional demands on the team. As a result, team functioning in crisis events involves handling each dimension of the crisis through distinct, yet concurrent, types of responses, namely team cognitive processes and collective emotions. Focusing on 20 teams of MBA students dealing with a simulated organizational crisis, we tracked the evolution of the co-occurrence (also called coupling) of team cognitive processes and collective emotions over the course of the crisis event. An exploratory visualization tool called GridWare was used to plot the coupling trajectory on a two-dimensional grid and compare the structure and the content of the coupling trajectory in higher-performing teams with lower-performing ones. The structure of the coupling trajectory in higher performers was not found to be any more or less variable than in lower performers. In terms of content, however, the coupling trajectory of higher-performing teams tended to fall into a single, strong coupling, as opposed to the coupling trajectory of lower-performing teams which tended to get drawn toward multiple, weaker couplings. The single, strong, attracting coupling that pulled the trajectory of higher-performers was the coupling of explicit action processing (a cognitive process) and midaroused-neutral collective emotion. In other words, higher performers had more tendency to keep returning to discussing and updating their actions in a midaroused-neutral emotional atmosphere. Implications for future research and crisis management training are discussed.