Examining the behavioral and structural characteristics of team leadership in extreme environments

• Date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2290
• Author: Marissa L. Shuffler,Christopher W. Wiese,C. Shawn Burke
• Published date: 01 July 2018

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Examining the behavioral and structural characteristics of team

leadership in extreme environments

C. Shawn Burke

1

|Marissa L. Shuffler

2

|Christopher W. Wiese

3

1

University of Central Florida, Orlando,

Florida, U.S.A.

2

Clemson University, Clemson, South

Carolina, U.S.A.

3

Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta,

Georgia, U.S.A.

Correspondence

C. Shawn Burke, University of Central Florida,

Orlando, Florida, U.S.A.

Email: sburke@ist.ucf.edu

Funding information

Johnson Space Center, Grant/Award Number:

NNX14AK54G; NASA, Grant/Award Number:

NNX14AK54G

Summary

Despite the growing interest in extreme teams, there is currently a lack of under-

standing concerning leadership within such teams, as the literature has predominantly

focused on team leadership within the context of traditional organizations. The

current study investigates team leadership within the context of teams operating in

extreme environments, with a specific focus on teams operating in isolated, confined

environments. We seek to identify team leadership functions as well as a subset of

structural characteristics associated with team leadership in extreme environments

(i.e., formality of leadership, locus of leadership, and leadership distribution). We

leverage a historiometric approach to capitalize on real historical examples of extreme

teams that are rich with critical information regarding actual team leadership functions

occurring in extreme settings. Results suggest that team leadership functions such as

team problem solving, supporting social climate, structure and planning, and

sensemaking are among the most prevalent. Results also indicated that the degree

to which leadership is distributed throughout the team as well as the formality of

leadership varies across action and transition phases of the team's task cycle.

KEYWORDS

extreme environments, team leadership, teams

1|INTRODUCTION

The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does

the greatest things. He is the one who gets the people

to do the greatest things (President Ronald Reagan)

Space exploration teams, polar exploration teams, long‐duration

sailboat racing teams, mountaineering teams, and provincial recon-

struction teams; what is the uniting factor among all these teams?

They are extreme teams. In essence, extreme teams are teams that

“(a) complete their tasks in performance environments with one or

more contextual features that are atypical in level (e.g., extreme time

pressure) or kind (e.g., confinement, danger) and (b) for which ineffec-

tive performance has serious consequences …” (Bell, Fisher, Brown, &

Mann, 2016, p. 2). Extreme team members are exposed to atypically

high levels of stressors that (a) appear in combination simultaneously

and (b) may be a mixture of chronic and acute in nature. The broader

literature on teams operating in what can be considered extreme con-

texts indicates that teams will often fail under such conditions—such

intense, continuously stressful situations can emphasize a focus on

self, decrease team perspective, decrease prosocial behaviors, and

negatively impact team decision‐making processes (Driskell & Salas,

1991; Driskell, Salas, & Johnston, 1999). Due to the critical nature of

extreme team performance, there have been repeated calls for more

research to facilitate an understanding of the factors that contribute

to team effectiveness within such environments (Bell et al., 2016;

Friedrich, Vessey, Schuelke, Ruark, & Mumford, 2009; Hannah,

Campbell, & Matthews, 2010; Keeton, Schmidt, Slack, & Malka, 2012).

One element that has been argued to play a critical role in

extreme team effectiveness is team leadership (e.g., Mulhearn et al.,

2016; Crosby, 2008; Hannah, Uhl‐Bien, Avolio, & Cavarretta, 2009).

The purpose of leadership in any given team is to establish goals and

set direction that will lead to accomplishing these goals (Zaccaro,

Rittman, & Marks, 2001). Previous research suggests that team

Received: 16 February 2017 Revised: 21 February 2018 Accepted: 29 March 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2290

716 Copyright © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J Organ Behav. 2018;39:716–730.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job