Leading the crew to Mars: Evidence from NASA HERA analog crews

Space agencies across the world have started to prepare for the next bold human endeavor, a mission to Mars. One of its significant challenges is organizational: supporting successful collaboration within a small team that will live and work together under extreme conditions for an extended period of time. Team leadership will be pivotal to mission success, providing direction, enabling creative thinking, minimizing conflicts, negotiating across expertise domains, and maintaining high levels of motivation throughout the mission. Whereas past space missions have largely taken the view that leadership must be hierarchical, given the autonomy of deep space exploration, these missions may benefit from shared leadership among the crew. The international nature of the mission, collaboration among peers, the combination of crew members with very different areas of expertise by design, and the unprecedented autonomy given to the crew all suggest that space crews may benefit from shared, as opposed to hierarchical leadership networks. In order to understand the role of leadership networks in deep space exploration, this study investigated crew leadership in 13 crews participating in HERA campaigns between 2016 and 2020. These crews exhibited substantial variation in leadership, at times adopting shared, hierarchical, and fragmented leadership. The designated commander was the most likely to be perceived as a leader as compared to the other crew members, though in many cases the commander shared leadership with other crew members. Each crew exhibited, at some point in the mission, both a shared and a hierarchical structure. Five crews exhibited a period when leadership was fragmented–when no single crew member was recognized as the leader by the other crew members. There was an interesting association between leadership structure and mission timing such that fragmentation was most likely to occur during the fourth quarter, and shared leadership was most likely to characterize the crew on the first and last day, as compared to any day in between. Lastly, shared leadership was most prevalent in Campaign 5, which removed the interior walls from inside the habitat, increasing interaction among crew members.