The ability to effectively work as a team is essential to meet the demands of the modern world and workforce. However, the COVID-19 crisis has drastically changed how teams collaborate, including periods of extended remote work, mixed remote and in-person teams, blurred home and work boundaries, elevated stress and anxiety, and extreme uncertainty about the future. The swift onset of the crisis required individuals, teams, and organizations to abruptly adapt to rapidly changing circumstances with little to no preparation. The proposed research will investigate disruptions to teamwork and how teams adapt during the COVID-19 crisis and in the ensuing recovery period. The project will investigate 30 real-world teams over a three-month period while in the midst of the crisis and for an additional one-month follow-up as events unfold. The goal is to understand how teams respond to changing contexts, how teams support each other, how conflict is managed, and how teams develop, adapt, and sustain the rhythms of teamwork during COVID-19 and in the ensuing recovery period. This foundational research will be essential to help organizations establish team structures and collaborative processes that enable them to more successfully address disruptions in the current and in future crises. The project will provide unique opportunities for interdisciplinary training of students in computer science and psychology, will broaden participation by recruiting diverse students, and will share a rich and unique dataset with the broad scientific community.
The specific aims are to: (1) understand states, processes, and behaviors (e.g., team cohesion, communication patterns, collective stress) of teams during the COVID-19 crisis with a focus on factors associated with team performance; (2) investigate how individuals and teams experience and adapt to major COVID-related life events, such as school closings, enforcing of social distancing, budget cuts, illnesses, and so on; and (3) identify patterns in team states and behaviors over time, detect disruptions to these patterns, and study how new patterns emerge during the crisis and in the ensuing period of recovery. The project will use wearable sensors to track heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and relative location (home or away), communication tools (e.g., team calendars, email metadata), ecological momentary assessments (EMAs), validated survey instruments, and semi-structured interviews to investigate team states, team processes, team behaviors, and team performances in context and over time. The findings will contribute basic knowledge on teaming under the unique context of COVID-19, what factors are associated with team performance, and whether changes teams adopt are temporary or permanent.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
