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Teams do not operate in a vacuum, but in specific real-world contexts. For many teams, this context includes high-demand, high-stress conditions which can negatively impact team functioning. In this chapter, we discuss how stress may impact team cohesion and examine stress mitigation strategies to overcome these effects.

The reliance on teams in today’s work environment underscores the importance of understanding how teams function. To better understand teams, one must be able to measure team dynamics or interaction. The purpose of this chapter is to outline an unobtrusive approach to measuring team dynamics from verbal communications.

The basic premise of this approach is that the words we use provide insight into how we feel and think at any given time. The methodology described in this chapter employs a lexical analytic approach to examining team dynamics. To best accomplish this, we first identify the principal features or dimensions of teamwork and then we propose lexical measures that may map to these processes.

This approach can be employed to track team functioning over time “at a distance” without interrupting task performance.

This chapter describes an approach to measuring relevant teamwork dimensions through verbal content. This approach has the potential to give us direct, unobtrusive insight into the emotional and cognitive states of teams. It is original in its examination of how team dynamics can be indexed in speech.

There has been an increasing emphasis on developing officers who can effectively make decisions in dynamic and stressful environments to manage volatile situations. The aim of this paper is to guide those seeking to optimize the limited resources dedicated to police training.

Drawing on research related to stress exposure training, principles of adult learning, the event-based approach to training and policing more broadly, the authors show how carefully crafted training scenarios can maximize the benefits of police training.

The authors’ review highlights various training principles that, if relied on, can result in scenarios that are likely to result in the development of flexible, sound decision-making skills when operating under stressful conditions. The paper concludes with an example of scenario development, which takes the reviewed principles into account.

The authors hope this discussion will be useful for police instructors and curriculum designers in making evidence-informed decisions when designing training scenarios.

The quality of strategic decisions made at the helm of corporations matters a great deal. Predominantly, research on strategic decision-making has focused on CEOs as if they decide alone. Yet in reality, even the most powerful CEO makes strategic decisions together with an executive board. This chapter offers a theoretical explanation of strategic board decision-making through the emotional contagion between the CEO and board members.

We used both previous research and qualitative material – two case studies and interviews with several dozen CEOs of large corporations as well as the board members of one of them – to build our theoretical model.

Our inBoard Emotional Contagion Model (inBECM) specifies the following individual–collective emotional dynamics: After a strategic affective event has triggered an affective discussion within the boardroom, the emotionally intelligent CEO communicates verbally in order to – through an emotional contagion – homogenize board members’ emotional states leading to shared sense-making of the event and – potentially – to improved decision-making.

Suggestions are made for the inBECM contribution to emotion theory. Implications are stated for the key role of emotion in improving board decision-making and strategizing.

This paper aims to explore the influence of collective orientation (CO) on coordination and team performance for interdependently working teams while controlling for person-related and team variables.

A total of 58 two-person-teams participated in a simulation-based firefighting task. The laboratory study took 2 h for each team. The effects of CO in tasks of increasing complexity were investigated under the consideration of control variables, and the relations between CO, coordination and team performance were assessed using a multivariate latent growth curve modeling approach and by estimating indirect effects in simple mediation models.

Team members high on CO performed significantly better than low-scoring members. The effect of CO on team performance was independent from an increasing task complexity, whereas the effect of CO on coordination was not. The effect of CO on team performance was mediated by coordination within the team, and the positive relation between CO and performance persists when including group efficacy into the model.

As CO is a modifiable person-related variable and important for effective team processes, additional research on factors influencing this attitude during work is assumed to be valuable.

CO is especially important for highly interdependently working teams in high-risk-organizations such as the fire service or nuclear power plants, where errors lead to severe consequences for human beings or the environment.

No other studies showed the importance of CO for coordination and team performance while considering teamwork-relevant variables and the interdependence of work.

The purpose of this study is to explore the extent to which teamwork (developed either during an initial training phase or during a subsequent deployment phase) is influenced by the nature of the team’s environment (extreme vs non-extreme) and the extent to which teamwork is one of the explaining mechanisms for team performance.

Data was collected from 60 teams at 2 time-points: training phase in The Netherlands or Germany and deployment phase (in locations such as Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina).

This study’s results indicate that when teams consider working in extreme environments, they develop higher levels of teamwork as compared to teams expecting to work in non-extreme environments. These differences remain stable also during the deployment phase, such that teams operating in extreme environments will continue to have higher levels of teamwork as compared to teams operating in non-extreme environments.

With this study, the authors contribute to the teamwork quality research stream by empirically studying how teamwork quality develops in unique military contexts such as extreme environments. Studies in such contexts are relatively rare.