Cross-Training Reduced Team Stress under Pressure

If your team is trying to do more with less these days—like every other team on the planet—a recent study shows cross-training should be a weapon in your arsenal. The military metaphor is apropos. The research was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research and involved a war game. But its implications fit in perfectly with research in less lethal workplaces and suggest a benefit you might not expect: Cross-training may also reduce your team's stress.

Previous studies showed that team members under pressure tend to turn inward. They go "heads-down," to use the current business jargon. They tend to communicate less, just when they ought to be sharing more. They become less clear on who is doing what and how, part of what scientists call a "shared mental model" of the team. Not surprisingly, these patterns contribute to higher stress. Business scientists Aleksander Ellis of the Univ. of Arizona and Matthew Pearsall of the Univ. of Maryland wondered if cross-training could reduce these impacts. "Cross-training can be defined as a training program where each team member receives instruction regarding the roles and responsibilities of his or her teammates," they write in the journal Group Dynamics before describing their study.

Imagine you are sitting in front of a computer screen in a room with three other people doing the same. An area in the middle of each screen is marked as the "highly restricted zone." Surrounding it is a "restricted zone." In the unrestricted areas around that, incoming lines like radar tracks begin to appear. Your team's job is to identify whether each track is friend or foe and how powerful the foes are, and then stop the baddies.

Your team has AWACS (radar) planes to identify each track, and tanks, helicopters, and jets. Each person has control of only one kind of vehicle, and knows the friendliness and power of only one of the four types of track after identification. The team has to dispatch a powerful enough vehicle to stop each threat. You might know who on the team knows what, or you might not. Now put your team in competition with others. Those in charge might place your team under extra pressure, or not. This describes what subjects in Ellis and Pearsall's study faced.

First, 54 teams of undergraduate students were trained on the game and did a practice round. Then the experiment began, with a big difference. In the practice round, everyone had access to all vehicles and track data. Once the experiment started, they became specialized. "DM4 (decision-maker 4) knew that track A had a power of 1 and had four jets, DM3 knew that track C had a power of 3 and had four helicopters," and so on. But they weren't told what each member knew and had.

After 15 minutes, the game paused. Some teams spent the next 15 minutes practicing as before. Others were told to rotate their members from computer to computer, thus learning what the others were doing. Finally there came another 30 minutes of game play in which each team dealt with 140 tracks of the four types. During that period, some teams were told every five minutes how much time was left. They were also told they were being videotaped, and, "If your team is one of the three lowest performers, your professor will show the tape to the entire class the last week of the semester as an example of ineffective teamwork." The other teams did not receive these extra pressures. Notice the four team conditions: high-pressure/cross-trained, no-pressure/cross-trained, high/not-trained, and no/not.

The researchers listened in during the game and counted how often members volunteered information like, "DM3, I have several C tracks in my restricted zone." (Subjects could only communicate verbally.) Afterward, to check shared mental models, the scientists had the subjects separately list the behaviors the team members followed, in order, and compared the lists to see how similar they were. They used surveys to find out how tense people felt during the game.

The pressure had the predicted effects. The pressured team members differed more in their views of the process, shared less information, and felt more stressed than nonpressured ones. But if pressured people had cross-trained, their levels on those measures were closer to those of unpressured teams.

Cross-training had no significant impact on unpressured teams in these measures, but it has other benefits. There is more backup when people are absent. Everybody has a better understanding of the impact their actions have on other people and the team's ability to get its job done. In teams doing more routine work than fighting off enemy intruders, cross-training reduces boredom and related problems like absenteeism and turnover.

Except as relates to that last point, the stress-reduction benefit from the study was new to me. It makes sense, though. When people go heads-down it can create a sense of isolation on top of the pressure. Knowing where you fit in the bigger picture and what your teammates are doing probably reduces that feeling. That knowledge would also increase the odds of people sharing information with you that is helpful, by the time you need it.

Ellis and Pearsall say there are three kinds of cross-training you could perform with your team. You could have people do presentations on what they do; have team members observe each other working; or have them actually do the tasks. In the study the third kind was used, which fits with what we know about the value of hands-on practice.

Unfortunately the study doesn't report which teams in the four conditions scored the best. Since their mental models and information sharing were better, the nonpressured teams probably did. If yours is one of those mythical beasts, maybe you do not need cross-training. But I don't believe in unicorns, so I suspect all of you need to bring that weapon to bear on your team's stress.

Action Item: Talk to your training or HR manager, if you have one, about how to get started with cross-training on your team. Or just have your team read this and come up with its own plan.

Source: Ellis, A., and M. Pearsall (2011), "Reducing the Negative Effects of Stress in Teams through Cross-Training: A Job Demands-Resources Model," Group Dynamics: Theory, Research, and Practice 15(1):16.