Mars mission simulations reveal key to teamwork under pressure

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Whether it's to the moon or Mars, a NASA mission requires some essential preparations: designing and developing the spacecraft, astronaut training and safety checks, clear goals, and strategies and procedures for maintaining communication between crews on Earth and in space.

Dorothy R. Carter, associate professor of management in the Michigan State University Eli Broad College of Business, studies leadership and teamwork within organizations. She received support from NASA for a collaborative project called Project FUSION, or Facilitating Unified Systems of Interdependent Organizational Networks, analyzing how to understand and mitigate communication delays between Mission Control on Earth and a crew of astronauts on a mission to Mars.

"NASA realized the collaboration that a long-duration mission, like sending a team of humans to Mars, goes far beyond just the members of the crew on the spacecraft. The astronauts have to continue to collaborate with many people on Earth," Carter said. "To do that effectively requires a large, collaborative—or 'multiteam'—system."

To conduct this study, Carter and her team collaborated with research volunteers living and working inside NASA's human exploration space analog, or HERA, capsule at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. Participants in the Kesseler Team Leadership Laboratory at Michigan State University acted as Mission Control for the HERA 'astronauts' in real-time simulations with different degrees of communication delays. The team then ran the data collected through the simulations through a computer model to mimic a larger sample.

The Project FUSION research team identified "collective attention"—when multiple people from different disciplines focus their attention on the same issue at the same time—as the key mechanism for large, complex, multi-team organizations to solve problems effectively. Carter's research, recently published in the journal Personnel Psychology, is the first study to directly position collective attention as the central link between communication delays and team performance.

"Based on our research, there are many different interventions that we think could help support collective attention, even during periods of communication delay," Carter said.

"Some examples include developing trust between members of Mission Control and the crew in space before the mission takes off, training on how to speak simpl