A Computational Approach to Examining Team Coordination Breakdowns During Crisis Situations

During crisis situations, teams are more prone to coordination breakdowns that are characterized by a temporary, diminished ability to function effectively as a team. However, team research currently lacks robust approaches for identifying transitions from effective team functioning to coordination breakdowns. With the current study, we aimed to develop such robust approaches, and to deepen our understanding of how team coordination dynamics across various physiological signals reflect coordination breakdowns. Consequently, we used audiovisual data from four-person teams involved in a stressful collaborative game task to manually identify coordination breakdowns. Next, we set out to computationally identify coordination breakdowns by applying continuous measures of team coordination (windowed synchronization coefficient and multidimensional recurrence quantification analysis) to photoplethysmogram and electrodermal activity data obtained during the task, and identifying transitions therein with change point and nonlinear prediction algorithms. We found that our computational coordination breakdown identification approaches can identify up to 96% of the manually identified coordination breakdowns although our results also show that the precision of our approaches falls far behind. Our findings contribute theoretically and methodologically to the systematic investigation of coordination breakdowns, which may ultimately facilitate the support of teams in responding to and mitigating negative consequences of crisis situations.