The Head and the Heart in Crisis: The Temporal Dynamics of the Interplay Between Team Cognitive Processes and Collective Emotions During Crisis Events

Organizations commonly use teams to rapidly and appropriately respond to crises. These teams must face a multidimensional challenge because crises not only present sets of ill-defined, complex problems, but also exert high emotional demands on the team. As a result, effective team functioning in crisis events involves handling each dimension of the crisis through distinct, yet concurrent, types of responses, namely team cognitive processes and collective emotions. Research on groups also suggests that cognitive processes and collective emotions are dynamically intertwined and can influence one another. Studies of crisis events to date, however, have largely examined cognition and emotion in isolation from one another. As a result, we know little about how team cognitive processes and collective emotions go hand in hand over the course a crisis event to shape team performance. This study seeks to address this research gap. Focusing on 20 teams of MBA students dealing with a simulated organizational crisis, I used a longitudinal research design and behavioural observation methods to examine the dynamics of the interplay between team cognitive processes and collective emotions at two different temporal scales.

At the micro-temporal scale, I examined the co-occurrence (also called coupling) of team cognitive processes and collective emotions to determine which observed couplings were statistically meaningful in higher- versus lower-performing teams facing a crisis event. Lag sequential analyses revealed that compared with lower-performing teams, higher-performing teams were less likely to engage in explicit situation processing in an emotionally-midaroused team atmosphere. Higher-performing teams were also less likely than lower-performing teams to exhibit implicit situation processing in an emotionally-neutral team atmosphere. Lower-performing teams, on the other hand, had more tendency to engage in implicit situation processing in an emotionally-homogeneous team atmosphere. Finally, lower-performing teams were more likely than higher-performing teams to exhibit implicit action processing in an emotionally-midaroused team atmosphere.

At the macro-temporal scale, I tracked the evolution of couplings over the course of the crisis event by means of an exploratory visualization tool called GridWare. GridWare enabled me to characterize and compare the structure and the content of the coupling trajectory of higher- and lower-performing teams. The coupling trajectory of higher performers was not found to be any more or less variable than that of lower performers. However, according to my analyses, the coupling trajectory of higher-performing teams was significantly more likely to become absorbed in a single, strong, attracting coupling, as opposed to the coupling trajectory of lower-performing teams which tended to get drawn toward multiple, weaker, attracting couplings. The single, strong attracting coupling that pulled the trajectory of higher-performing teams was the coupling of explicit action processing and midaroused-neutral collective emotions. This indicates that higher performers had more tendency to keep returning to discussing and updating their decisions/actions in a midaroused-neutral emotional atmosphere. Theoretical contributions of this study and implications of these findings for practice and for future research are discussed.