Designing Collaborative Learning / Group Projects

Most teams will face a major challenge sooner or later, and understanding the groups’ dynamics in these moments can shed light on how to prepare organizations for addressing crises in the heat of the moment.
   
Teams attempt to draw meaning from reality by understanding it in the context of a greater schematic of knowledge, beliefs, or assumptions, in a process known as sensemaking (Weick 1993). When the unfolding events overwhelm the group and disrupt their comprehension of the situation at hand, sensemaking, and sometimes the team with it, falls apart. Even before a crisis, however, an awareness of the team’s collective understanding of the task at hand might yield insight on how the team might try to address it. Especially when analyzed at the individual level to explore unspoken differences between teammates’ task and role conceptualizations, one could speculate on where cracks might form when these conceptualizations are tested. The role of the task in team dynamics has long been studied, but an interesting insight comes from a 2011 publication that explored how the task at hand shaped the dynamics of American intelligence teams charged with preventing terrorist attacks in simulations (Hackman 2011). The attacking teams tended to win because they could define a specific goal to focus on. In other words, they only needed one attack to work and could align their roles flexibly to fit the task. In contrast, the defending teams often floundered because their task was more ambiguous. Even with more resources at their disposal, the defending teams’ conceptualizations of the task could never be coordinated because they had to defend against multiple possible angles. As a result, these defending teams defined their roles more inflexibly based on job title as opposed to how they could apply their skills to the task. In other words, the ambiguous task seemed to be related to unclear conceptualization of roles. Weick (1993) also discussed the importance of role structures in mitigating the collapse of sensemaking, particularly in crises that challenge initial conceptualizations of the task at hand.

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One tool that has been used to analyze key moments of team failure is the critical incident technique, which focuses on identifying and analyzing specific behaviors and events that significantly influence outcomes. Originating from a series of studies of the United States Air Force during World War II, John C. Flanagan pioneered a procedure through which observations of human behavior in key moments could shed light on broader principles of human psychology (Flanagan, 1954). Often done through interviews of participants after a recent incident, the critical incident technique collects specific and detailed incident-based narratives that can help analyze the cause-and-effect relationship within the context of impactful events and outcomes.

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A risk of relying on interviews is the possibility that interviewees describe or rationalize behavior consistent with an espoused theory, which is incongruent with their theory in use (Argyris & Schon, 1996). This is to say that there is a gap between what people think they are doing and what they are actually doing, and that conflating the two could lead to a decrease in construct validity. Although this gap cannot be avoided completely, the critical incident technique attempts to minimize the influence of hypothetical speculation on the part of the interviewee by focusing exclusively on specific events that actually transpired (Bott & Tourish 2016). In our study, rather than being the basis of inference on their own, these interviews can be used to give context to actual observations of the events themselves.

Another factor that might influence the validity of interviews is psychological safety, which is a factor that influences a team’s willingness to speak up without the fear of reprisal. Cannon and Edmondson (2005) identified that individuals in organizations often ignore or even hide their failures to avoid embarrassment and/or punishment. Because we intend to analyze failure experiences with the critical incident technique, we predict that these interviews will be less effective when an incentive to hide or avoid failure exists. Psychological safety can help to buffer against many of these barriers that impede the identification and discussion of failures to begin with. We intend to address this concern by focusing our questioning and analysis on the teams’ process rather than on the outcomes.

For our study, we hope to dissect the complex interplay of an individual player’s reaction to a critical incident as coded in our code book, and how that creates a collective impact on the team's process and outcome. Moreover, we speculate that members’ conceptualizations of each others’ roles will also influence their behavior in crises that challenge sensemaking. Critical incidents which challenge organizational sensemaking should put particular strain on the gaps between reciprocal role conceptualizations, and we predict that teams with less cohesion therebetween will also be more likely to face a collapse of sensemaking.