Teamwork in extreme environments: Lessons, challenges, and opportunities

• Date: 01 July 2018
• Published date: 01 July 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2302

EDITORIAL

Teamwork in extreme environments: Lessons, challenges, and

opportunities

Summary

Given the numerous calls for researchers to examine teams in

the wild to better understand the impact of context on team

dynamics and performance, there has been increased consid-

eration of teams operating within extreme environments. As

such, this special issue is focused on better understanding

the factors that shape teamwork in extreme environments so

that the lessons learned can be leveraged within extreme as

well as in other team contexts as appropriate. To this end,

we present five exemplar papers that span disciplines, address

diverse research questions in unique samples, and employ var-

ied methodologies and research designs. Each of these papers

not only contributes new insights to the understanding of

teams in extreme environments (i.e., lessons) but also high-

lights the challenges that exist in conducting research in such

contexts and sets the stage for additional opportunities within

the extreme team literature moving forward.

1|INTRODUCTION

Across a variety of disciplines, research has demonstrated the value

of teams to addressing complex and challenging problems. Seeking

to leverage these capabilities, team‐based work arrangements have

been adopted in diverse contexts ranging from traditional, for‐profit

firms to more nontraditional settings such as health‐care

organizations, military special forces, emergency response, space

exploration, and technology innovation start‐ups (e.g., Mathieu,

Maynard, Rapp, & Gilson, 2008; Tannenbaum, Mathieu, Salas, &

Cohen, 2012). Although teams appear to have benefits across these

varied contexts, there have been numerous calls for researchers to

examine teams in the wild (e.g., Burke, Salas, Estep, & Pierce, 2007)

to better understand the contextual nuances faced by teams (e.g.,

Johns, 2006). Likewise, Mathieu et al. (2008) advocated that team

researchers need to more fully capture and embrace the

“complexities of current team arrangements”(p. 463). Responding

to these calls, organizational researchers have begun to more fully

incorporate situational complexities and nuances into empirical

examinations of team functioning and effectiveness.

In one noteworthy stream of work, researchers have used the

term extreme to describe intense, risky, and often dangerous

environments that place unique demands on the teams operating

within them (e.g., Bell, Fisher, Brown, & Mann, in press; Hällgren,

Rouleau, & De Rond, 2018; Klein, Ziegert, Knight, & Xiao, 2006).

For example, researchers have studied teams that regularly operate

in extreme environments such as disaster response (e.g., Rankin,

Dahlbäck, & Lundberg, 2013; Wageman, Gardner, & Mortensen,

2012), community building in Afghanistan (Kemp, 2011), polar

expedition (e.g., Leon, Sandal, Fink, & Ciofani, 2011), police SWAT

teams (e.g., Bechky & Okhuysen, 2011), emergency rooms in

trauma hospitals (e.g., Klein et al., 2006), mining (e.g., Allsop &

Wray, 2012), and space exploration (e.g., Keeton, Schmidt, Slack,

& Malka, 2012).

Given the insights gained from such studies and the emerging

literature devoted to understanding teams in extreme contexts

(e.g., Bell et al., in press; Bishop, 2004; Hällgren et al., 2018), we

present this special issue dedicated to examining teamwork in

extreme environments. A primary aim of this special issue is to pro-

vide a place for researchers working in this area to share knowledge

from cutting‐edge research and enable a cross‐fertilization of lessons

learned from these contexts to be translated into actionable knowl-

edge. To this end, we present five exemplar papers that span disci-

plines, address diverse research questions in unique samples, and

employ varied methodologies and research designs. Each of these

papers not only contributes new insights to the understanding of

teams in extreme environments but also highlights the challenges that

exist in conducting research in such contexts. In the sections that fol-

low, we begin by discussing the factors that make an environment

extreme and then provide an overview of each of the five papers.

We conclude by extrapolating lessons learned from this set of papers,

examining some of the key challenges to conducting research on

teamwork in these unique contexts, and discuss opportunities

for future research to advance our understanding of teamwork in

extreme environments.

2|WHAT MAKES AN ENVIRONMENT

EXTREME?

Recently, researchers have begun to identify the features that set

extreme environments apart from more traditional contexts, as well

Received: 22 May 2018 Accepted: 28 May 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2302

J Organ Behav. 2018;39:695–700. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 695