Sleep Deprivation Impairs Team Performance and Cohesion.

Study objectives: Teams that work together across location, time and organisation are known as distributed teams. These teams often work in demanding environments that are stressful and fatiguing due to extended periods of wakefulness, intense work, and working during night hours. The aim of this study was to examine the impact of prolonged wakefulness on team performance and cohesion.

Methods: n = 22 healthy, young individuals (M = 22.60,SD = 4.41 years,11f) participated in a five-day laboratory study with 62-hours of wakefulness. Throughout the sleep deprivation period, 4-person distributed team members completed the COHESION team task while physically isolated from one another. This task assessed cooperation, productivity, individual performance, team performance and team dynamics. Fatigue and subjective measures of team cohesion were also administered.

Results: There were statistically significant differences between team member cooperation and team dynamics across the sleep deprivation period (p<.05,ƞp2 > 0.14), with steep declines in cooperation and team dynamics after 21 h of prior wake. There were statistically significant differences across productivity, team performance and team cohesion over the sleep deprivation period (p<.05,ƞp2 > 0.14), with deficits after 36 h of wake.

Conclusions: Team members acted more selfishly than cooperatively after 21 h of total sleep deprivation, resulting in poorer team dynamics. Distributed team members were no longer able to engage effectively with their teams after 36 h of total sleep deprivation due to fatigue which was associated with poorer distributed team performance and cohesion. These findings show impairments for distributed teams who operate with severe fatigue in safety-critical working environments.