Task Progress:
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Aims of Proposal: The proposed research addresses the performance effects of entrainment during an operational space flight context. We explore what can be done to mitigate the negative effects of entrainment and improve individual and team capabilities to engage in effective task switching. We seek to address the following: Need to understand threats to teams during long duration missions, Need to identify countermeasures to support team function for all phases of autonomous, long duration missions, and Need to identify psychosocial and psychological factors, measures, and combinations thereof that can be used to compose effective crews for autonomous, long-duration missions.
We consider the effects of crew member entrainment (Ancona & Chong, 1996) between crew member engagement and effectiveness. Entrainment may be especially problematic as astronauts shift between tasks that may vary significantly in their physical, cognitive, and emotional demands (Smith-Jentsch, 2015). Features of specific tasks that individuals transition between can foster attention residue, or the inability to decouple one’s mental energies from previous tasks (Leroy, 2009), which in turn, hinders effectiveness in subsequent tasks. The difficulty in transitioning one’s attention also creates problems with transitions between tasks, and in turn, hinders effectiveness in subsequent tasks.
In previous years, we have viewed entrainment as retrospective—tasks that crew members have already transitioned away from that linger with them (Newton, LePine, Kim, Wellman, & Bush, 2020). Although our ongoing work replicates previous findings in different habitats or contexts, we now consider entrainment effects from anticipating upcoming tasks. It is possible that crew members may struggle to transition effectively between tasks when they anticipate or are preoccupied by an upcoming future task. In 2020, prior to COVID-19, we conducted one mission as part of campaign 5 in HERA to investigate this effect. Although we do not directly test this hypothesis aboard the ISS, our post-flight interviews explore this phenomenon. Our collective findings enhance our understanding of the psychological and interpersonal pathways through which entrainment operates (both backward and forward looking), and individual and task attributes that can mitigate its effects. Understanding this phenomenon could help develop strategies to improve individual and team effectiveness (i.e., including task scheduling) in a variety of organizational contexts including exploration missions.
HERA Campaigns: In 2020, we found preliminary support for our anticipatory engagement hypotheses in one HERA mission. As with previous years, we sought to seamlessly integrate our study into the natural workflow of HERA crew members. That is, we utilized existing maintenance and payload tasks which were scheduled to occur during the mission. Working with subject matter experts (SMEs), we selected a finalized series of “task-transition-task” episodes to serve as the focal point of the study. After the completion of the second task, crew members completed a brief survey about their engagement and attention residue in past tasks and their anticipatory engagement in upcoming tasks—and whether this anticipation distracted or motivated them on the initial task in a “task-transition-task” sequence.
ISS Campaigns: One crew member returned from orbit in 2020. While aboard the ISS, this crew member reflected every two weeks on a recent transition between two tasks. Reported were the level of engagement in the tasks, how seamlessly was the transition, and what generally went well and what could have gone better. Following return to Earth, we conducted a 30-minute qualitative interview, where we asked about experience transitioning aboard the ISS. These interviews gave insight into the task transition phenomenon.
NEK (Nezemnyy Eksperimental’nyy Kompleks, Russia’s IBMP Ground-based Experimental Complex) Campaign: We examined the challenges in anticipating upcoming tasks during 2019 in the NEK environment. We found that anticipating an upcoming task reduced engagement in a present task if the upcoming task were complex in nature. These effects appear to be stronger at the beginning of the mission prior to routinization. Although we planned to further investigate this phenomenon in 2020, COVID-19 has postponed subsequent NEK missions until 2021.
Our findings reveal a rich understanding of task transitions that influence multifaceted work. Consistent with our previous findings, task engagement has positive and negative consequences on subsequent tasks. On the one hand, task engagement activates positive affect and thereby engagement in subsequent tasks, which increases crew member effectiveness. On the other hand, task engagement lingers after individuals move to subsequent tasks, negatively impacting subsequent task engagement and effectiveness. Completing a task is critical in reducing the negative cognitive effects that can impair subsequent engagement and effectiveness. Moreover, preliminary evidence from HERA and NEK missions suggests that anticipating upcoming tasks reduces task engagement, particularly when the upcoming task is perceived to be complex. Our ongoing research aims to help NASA leverage the benefits of engaging work during task transitions, while limiting the associated risks of attention residue and anticipatory engagement.
References:
Ancona, D., & Chong, C. L. (1996). Entrainment: Pace, cycle, and rhythm in organizational behavior. Research in Organizational Behavior, 18, 251-284.
Leroy, S. (2009). Why is it so hard to do my work? The challenge of attention residue when switching between work tasks. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 109(2), 168-181. doi: 10.1006/obhd.2001.2974
Newton, D. W., LePine, J. A., Kim, J., Wellman, N., & Bush, J. T. (2020). Taking engagement to task: The nature and functioning of task engagement across transitions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 105, 1-18. doi:10.1037/apl0000428
Smith-Jentsch, K. A. (2015). On shifting from autonomous to interdependent work: What we know and what we need to learn (pp. 1-31). Houston, TX: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
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