Study: More than a feeling: rapport and complex task performance in teams
Picture a cockpit crew of two who met just minutes before takeoff, now descending through a turbulent midnight sky.
They aren't looking at each other-their eyes scan the instruments in the cockpit and the horizon outside-and yet they move in perfect sync.
This isn't just professional courtesy. It's a high-speed psychological "meshing" that keeps flights safe.
Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, co-authored a new study to show how interpersonal rapport and synchrony influence the performance of teams engaged in complex, high-stakes tasks.
The study, published in Team Performance Management, found that rapport-composed of positivity, mutual liking and interpersonal coordination-isn't just a "soft" social concept but a critical factor in the successful performance of complex, interdependent tasks. Teams exhibiting higher levels of these components perform significantly better than those that don't.
When flight crews are scheduled, the teams are shuffled for every flight on purpose for a mix of logistical, psychological and safety reasons. Because pilots are constantly rotated, they cannot rely on habits or personal shortcuts developed with a regular partner. They are forced to stick strictly to the manual.
"They can't create and rely on their own team culture," Sanchez-Burks said. "By design, everything remains standardized when you're collaborating with strangers, and so they're having to establish this connection and rapport every time they fly a plane."
The researchers followed 41 pilots across 203 flight simulator sessions. After each session, pilots provided self-reports on their feelings of positivity, how much they liked their co-pilot and how "in sync" they felt during various phases of the flight.
To ensure the findings weren't just based on the pilots' subjective feelings, flight instructors (acting as expert third parties) rated the crews using a standardized aviation performance evaluation.
Results revealed that while all three components of rapport correlated with performance, only interpersonal coordination was a significant predictor of expert-rated performance.
"It was very insightful to us that this subtle interpersonal coordination could matter even in this type of context, where you think it's all about the technical aspects of the task," Sanchez-Burks said.
After establishing that coordination was the key driver of performance, the researchers used a second study to identify exactly what those successful "coordinated" behaviors looked like.
Results showed that even in environments where nonverbal cues are limited, such as a cockpit, team members establish connection through complex conversational patterns and shared vocalizations, such as laughter.
"It basically shows that even when you're in sort of 'deep work mode' … these very subtle interpersonal coordination cues are not noise or unrelated to the task," Sanchez-Burks said. "They actually tie into the team's ability to coordinate, especially when you're dealing with complex tasks."
Written by Judi Melena Smelser, Ross School of Business
