Affect and group/team performance

More recently research has paid attention to how affect can be transferred amongst groups and teams. This is important because collective affective experiences can influence collective decision making and collective performance. Barsade (2002), for example, examined group emotional contagion on the transfer of mood among people in the group and its

Chapter 2: Literature review 42 influence on workgroup dynamics. Emotional contagion is ‘a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behaviour of another person or group through conscious or unconscious induction of emotional states and behavioural attitudes’ (p.646). Emotional contagion was

measured on self-report ratings, on a 9-point Likert-type scale pre-test and post-test. Participants were asked to what extent they felt pleasant, happy, optimistic, warm, unhappy, pessimistic, gloomy, lethargic, depressed and sad.

In addition to participants assessing their moods, they were also asked to assess their group’s task performance. Observers were also involved in rating the cooperative and competitiveness of the group from watching participants’ interactions via video recordings. The results showed that people continuously influenced other people’s moods which in turn influenced behaviours and judgements. In terms of group dynamics, the findings revealed that positive emotional contagion influenced

cooperativeness and perceptions of task performance.

Brown and Brooks (2002) conducted qualitative research, using a grounded theory approach, to understand the emotional climate between day shift and night shift nurses in hospitals. They defined emotional climate as, ‘the set, or sets, of emotions or feelings, shared by groups of individuals implicated in common social structures and processes, and significant in the formation and maintenance of political and social identities and collective behaviour’ (p. 332). Brown and Brooks used the nine dimensions of emotional climate (i.e., structure, responsibility, reward, risk, warmth, support, conflict and identity) as developed by Litwin and Stringer (1968) to investigate the emotional climate in which nurses undertake their work.

Chapter 2: Literature review 43 After analysing over 35 hours of taped semi-structured interviews, Brown and Brooks concluded that the emotional climate of night nursing

encompassed all six dimensions found by Litwin and Stringer (1968). In addition, Brown and Brooks’ research found that nurses who worked during the night (as opposed to nurses who worked during the day) perceived that they took on substantial responsibility for patient care and felt they were overextended in their work activities which in turn

appeared to provoke a feeling of vulnerability and fear. This is important because it illustrated that working under certain conditions such as working with fewer staff can potentially lead to work intensification and stronger negative emotions based on perceptions of vulnerability. The findings of Brown and Brooks (2002) also showed that in terms of identity, there were attitudinal or cultural differences between the nurses that worked at night and those that worked during the day. Social identity has an important role in the workplace because with identity comes emotional importance of being a member of the group (Tajfel cited in Augoustinos, Walker & Donahue 2006) which is constructed through values and beliefs (Augoustinos et al. 2006). Participants who worked at night stated that they felt they were more qualified and experienced than the nurses who work during the day, even though they are all identified as nurses who work on wards and there were very few differences in their demographic characteristics. This illustrates that amongst nurses there was a sense of in-groups and out-groups where each group had their own set of collectively held norms, values and beliefs.

Brown and Brooks’ research also found that some nurses who worked during the day wanted to change to night shift because there was a stronger sense of camaraderie and a sense of belonging amongst night nurses. These findings are important because they illustrated that while nurses who worked at night experienced more pressure, vulnerability and

Chapter 2: Literature review 44 fear, they also sensed a stronger collective identity under such adversity. These findings are particularly interesting to note in this thesis. First, because it will be shown in this thesis that in incident management work these feelings are also evident. Second, it will be demonstrated in this thesis there are in-groups and out-groups that were described by participants, which will be shown to be based on different divisions of labour and other organisational characteristics. When people identify in- groups and out-groups in culture it provides insights into what is

happening within and between those groups (Keyton 2005). Third,it is arguedthroughout this thesis that identity and emotions are embedded in work activity and are therefore pertinent elements in social relationships. Two experimental studies were conducted by Levin, Kurtzberg, Philips and Lount Jr. (2010) to investigate the role of affect in knowledge transfer. Levin et al. (2010) considered that knowledge transfer involved ‘different individual tasks (i.e., sharing and listening) that are nonetheless interdependent and require interpersonal communication’ (p. 125). In Levin et al. (2010) research, the first study consisted of MBA students (n=108) and the second study consisted of undergraduates (n=180). Specifically, they looked at elation/happiness as a positive affective state and anger/frustration as a negative affective state. The results showed that people who received and absorbed new information had heightened affective experiences as opposed to those people who sent the

information. Moreover, receivers who experienced elation/happiness had more success in sharing and receiving information than did those who were experiencing anger/frustration. While the findings also showed that senders’ affective states had no direct impact on knowledge transfer, it did have an indirect role. Pairs where both sender and receiver

experienced the same affect did better in their performance than others, in terms of successful information exchange, than the pairs where both

Chapter 2: Literature review 45 sender and receiver were experiencing differing affective states. In light of these findings, Levin et al. (2010) concluded that ‘affect plays a critical but somewhat complex role in the knowledge-transfer process’ (p. 135). The role of affect in knowledge transfer is important to this thesis because it is a fundamental process in teamwork and therefore in managing

incidents. In addition, there are times when fire and emergency personnel are subjected to working under extreme conditions which can potentially lead them to experiencing both positive and negative heightened arousal. Thus, it is important to gain an understanding of how affect might influence their knowledge transfer.

Experimental research conducted by Pfaff and McNeese (2010) focused on the effects of mood and stress on team cognition. The concept of team cognition recognises that individuals alone might not have the knowledge and skills to complete the task individually, hence, other team members’ cognition and resources are sourced. A computer-based simulation (i.e., NeoCITES) that represented situations and resource allocation of tasks of distributed incident management teams was used for the experiment. The two experiments developed for the study were almost identical, with the exception that time pressure was used in Experiment 1 and performance pressure was used in Experiment 2. In the stress condition of Experiment 1, participants received 30 incidents to resolve in the timeframe of 10 minutes. In the non-stress condition participants received 18 incidents to resolve in the timeframe of 10 minutes. The result showed that, in part, time pressure was detrimental to the teams’ performance because of the negative affect it produced. According to Pfaff and McNeese (2010), the results suggested that participants with negative moods felt unable to make a contribution in the team’s outcome; they were less likely to prompt their team members to take action and made less effort to anticipate what other team members required. The results also showed

Chapter 2: Literature review 46 that participants who had high levels of negative affect and anxiety also felt that within-team cooperation was low.

These findings have important insights because in high-reliability work such as incident management teamwork, high cognitive and physical demands, and time pressure are prevalent (Cannon-Bowers & Salas 1998). In addition, teams who work under intense pressure need to anticipate the needs of others (Orasanu 1990) and have a sense of collective trust and team orientation as these elements can contribute to optimising teamwork (Salas et al. 2007) when attempting to resolve problems.

Table 2.1 summarises the studies reviewed in this section. What can be drawn from these studies is that when people are engaged in work activity that is both productive and meaningful, it contributes to one’s positive affective experiences, which in turn assists in enhancing interpersonal skills, knowledge transfer processes and flexible thinking. In addition, people’s affective experiences are transferable amongst group/team members, and this can influence the dynamics of the team and therefore collective performance. When people work in high-consequence

environments they are susceptible to feeling vulnerable and having a sense of fear. In such environments when there is a sense of urgency, it can negatively influence people’s affective experiences and, therefore, collective performance. In summary, these studies have shown that affect is important to consider in work activity; that individuals’ affective experiences can influence collective performance and when working in high-consequence environments it is emotionally, cognitively and physically demanding. The limitations to these studies are that many of them used self-report measures only and the participants were

47 Table 2.1 The contributions and problematics of studies examining affect and performance

Author and date

Examined Results Contributions to this thesis Problematics of the studies

Fisher & Noble (2004)

•The ways in which

work activity plays a part in emotional states

•Tasks, skills and interest in

work activities contribute to positive emotional states

•Conducted in the workplace whilst engaged

in work activity

•Self-report measures only

Isen & Reeve (2005)

•The influence of

positive affect on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

•Positive affect influences

intrinsic motivation and is beneficial to flexible thinking

•Affect is linked to motivation

•Affect is important to consider in work

activity (including problem solving

•Conducted with undergraduates

Tsai, Chen & Liu (2007)

•The linkages between

positive moods and task performance

•People with positive moods

may perform better through interpersonal skills

•There is a linkage between

performance and efficacy spirals

•Looked at supportive behaviours (which

underpin effective teamwork practices) with co-workers and task performance

•Included self-efficacy with moods

•Does not consider context (e.g.,

culture)

Barsade (2000)

•The transfer of mood

among people in the group and its influence on workgroup

dynamics

•Moods are transferable

amongst group members and influence group dynamics

•Collective emotions

•Looked at how individual moods can

transfer amongst groups and can influence group performance

•Considered group dynamics

•Self-report measures only

•Conducted with undergraduates

Brown & Brooks (2002) •Identifying the emotional climate of night nursing

•Night nurses carry

considerable responsibility and experience feelings of vulnerability and fear

•Sense of identity and

camaraderie are important in night nursing

•Feelings of vulnerability and fear appear to

characteristic when working in high- consequence environment

•Considered cultural elements

•Grounded theory

•Considered social identity

•The influences of the emotional

climate of night nursing on performance was not explored

48

Author and date

Examined Results Contributions to this thesis Problematics of the studies

Levin et al. (2010)

•The role of affect in

knowledge transfer

•Affect influences knowledge-

transfer processes

•Examined the linkages between affect and

knowledge transfer

•Examining knowledge transfer as a group

level construct

•Conducted with undergraduates

Pfaff & McNeese (2010)

•The effects of mood

and stress on distributed team cognition

•Time pressure is detrimental

to a team’s performance because of the negative effect it produces

•Negative affect influences

team outcomes

•Examined linkages between stress, affect

and team cognition when operating under time pressure which is cognitively and physically demanding

Chapter 2: Literature review 49